d each of them to climb about
among the ruins, and had taken them both up the steep, dark stairway of
one of the towers, and stood with them looking over the turrets into the
courtyard and the moat. He knew the history of the castle and could
point out the banquet-hall and the chapel and the serving-places, and
knew legends about the dungeons.

"He gives us all a turn, mother," said Miss Cora Brooke. "He even gave a
turn yesterday to poor Emily Fox-Seton. He's rather nice."

There was a great deal of laughter at lunch after their return. Miss
Cora Brooke was quite brilliant in her gay little sallies. But though
she was more talkative than Lady Agatha, she did not look more
brilliant.

The letter from Curzon Street had not made the beauty shed tears. Her
face had fallen when it had been handed to her on her return, and she
had taken it upstairs to her room with rather a flagging step. But when
she came down to lunch she walked with the movement of a nymph. Her
lovely little face wore a sort of tremulous radiance. She laughed like a
child at every amusing thing that was said. She might have been ten
years old instead of twenty-two, her colour, her eyes, her spirits
seemed of a freshness so infantine.

She was leaning back in her chair laughing enchantingly at one of Miss
Brooke's sparkling remarks when Lord Walderhurst, who sat next to her,
said suddenly, glancing round the table:

"But where is Miss Fox-Seton?"

It was perhaps a significant fact that up to this moment nobody had
observed her absence. It was Lady Maria who replied.

"I am almost ashamed to answer," she said. "As I have said before, Emily
Fox-Seton has become the lodestar of my existence. I cannot live without
her. She has walked over to Maundell to make sure that we do not have a
dinner-party without fish to-night."

"She has _walked_ over to Maundell," said Lord Walderhurst--"after
yesterday?"

"There was not a pair of wheels left in the stable," answered Lady
Maria. "It is disgraceful, of course, but she is a splendid walker, and
she said she was not too tired to do it. It is the kind of thing she
ought to be given the Victoria Cross for--saving one from a dinner-party
without fish."

The Marquis of Walderhurst took up the cord of his monocle and fixed the
glass rigidly in his eye.

"It is not only four miles to Maundell," he remarked, staring at the
table-cloth, not at Lady Maria, "but it is four miles back."

"By a singular coincidence