Even my widow's weeds were sketched and copied. My nerves grew worse.
Life seemed unendurable.

"At last I consulted a great specialist, who is also a trusted friend. He
ordered me a rest-cure. Not to be shut up within four walls with my own
worries, but to go right away alone; to leave my own identity, and all
appertaining thereto, completely behind; to go to a place to which I had
never before been, where I knew no one, and should not be known; to live
in the open air; fare simply; rise early, retire early; but, above all,
as he quaintly said: 'Leave Lady Ingleby behind.'

"I followed his advice to the letter. He is not a man one can disobey. I
did not like the idea of taking a fictitious name, so I decided to be
'Mrs. O'Mara,' and naturally entered her address in the visitors' book,
as well as her name.

"Oh, that evening of arrival! You were quite right, Jim. I felt just a
happy child, entering a new world of beauty and delight--all holiday and
rest.

"And then--I saw you! And, oh my beloved, I think almost from the first
moment my soul flew to you, as to its unquestioned mate! Your vitality
became my source of vigour; your strength filled and upheld everything in
me which had been weak and faltering. I owed you much, before we had
really spoken. Afterwards, I owed you life itself, and love, and
all--ALL, Jim!"

Myra paused, silently controlling her emotion; then, bending forward,
laid her lips upon the roughness of his hair. It might have been the
stirring of the breeze, for all the sign he made.

"When I found at first that you had come from the war, when I realised
that you must have known Michael, I praised the doctor's wisdom in making
me drop my own name. Also the Murgatroyds would have known it
immediately, and I should have had no peace, As it was, Miss Murgatroyd
occasionally held forth in the sitting-room concerning 'poor dear Lady
Ingleby,' whom she gave us to understand she knew intimately. And
then--oh, Jim! when I came to know my cosmopolitan cowboy; when he told
me he hated titles and all that appertained to them; then indeed I
blessed the moment when I had writ myself down plain 'Mrs. O'Mara'; and I
resolved not to tell him of my title until he loved me enough not to mind
it, or wanted me enough, to change me at once from Lady Ingleby of
Shenstone Park, into plain Mrs. Jim Airth of--anywhere he chooses to take
me!

"Now you will understand why I felt I could not marry you validly in
Cornwal