answered by a voice close at his side.

"You were happier with _me_, sir," said the voice, in accents of tender
regret.

He looked up with a scream--literally, with a scream--and confronted
Mrs. Lecount.

Was it the specter of the woman, or the woman herself? Her hair was
white; her face had fallen away; her eyes looked out large, bright, and
haggard over her hollow cheeks. She was withered and old. Her dress hung
loose round her wasted figure; not a trace of its buxom autumnal beauty
remained. The quietly impenetrable resolution, the smoothly insinuating
voice--these were the only relics of the past which sickness and
suffering had left in Mrs. Lecount.

"Compose yourself, Mr. Noel," she said, gently. "You have no cause to
be alarmed at seeing me. Your servant, when I inquired, said you were
in the garden, and I came here to find you. I have traced you out, sir,
with no resentment against yourself, with no wish to distress you by so
much as the shadow of a reproach. I come here on what has been, and is
still, the business of my life--your service."

He recovered himself a little, but he was still incapable of speech. He
held fast by the fence, and stared at her.

"Try to possess your mind, sir, of what I say," proceeded Mrs. Lecount.
"I have come here not as your enemy, but as your friend. I have been
tried by sickness, I have been tried by distress. Nothing remains of me
but my heart. My heart forgives you; my heart, in your sore need--need
which you have yet to feel-places me at your service. Take my arm, Mr.
Noel. A little turn in the sun will help you to recover yourself."

She put his hand through her arm and marched him slowly up the garden
walk. Before she had been five minutes in his company, she had resumed
full possession of him in her own right.

"Now down again, Mr. Noel," she said. "Gently down again, in this fine
sunlight. I have much to say to you, sir, which you never expected to
hear from me. Let me ask a little domestic question first. They told me
at the house door Mrs. Noel Vanstone was gone away on a journey. Has she
gone for long?"

Her master's hand trembled on her arm as she put that question. Instead
of answering it, he tried faintly to plead for himself. The first words
that escaped him were prompted by his first returning sense--the sense
that his housekeeper had taken him into custody. He tried to make his
peace with Mrs. Lecount.

"I always meant to do something for you," he sa