d to
disturb her beautiful serenity. It was by the cultivation of a beautiful
serenity that she had hoped to strengthen her appeal to Brodrick and her
position in his house. In the beginning that position had been so
fragile and infirm that she had had then no trust in its continuance.
Three years ago she had come to him, understanding that she was not to
stay. She was a far removed, impoverished cousin of Mrs. John
Brodrick's. Hence her claim. They had stretched the point of cousinship
to shelter the proprieties so sacred to every Brodrick. He had not
wanted her. He preferred a housekeeper who was not a lady, who would not
have to be, as he expressed it, all over the place. But he was sorry for
the impoverished lady and he had let her come. Then his sister Sophy had
urged him to keep her on until he married. Sophy meant until he married
the lady she intended him to marry. He had not married that lady nor any
other; he was not going to marry at all, he told them. But he had kept
Gertrude on.

He had said at the time that he didn't think she would do, but he would
try her. He regarded Gertrude with the suspicion a Brodrick invariably
entertained for any idea that was not conspicuously his own. But
Gertrude had managed, with considerable adroitness, to convince him that
she was, after all, his own idea. And when Sophy Levine triumphed, as a
Brodrick invariably did triumph, in the proved perfection of her scheme,
he said, Yes, Miss Collett was all right, now that he had trained her.
If he approved of Miss Collett it was because she was no longer
recognizable as the Miss Collett they had so preposterously thrust on
him. He could not have stood her if she had been.

Brodrick was right. Gertrude was not the same woman. She did not even
look the same. She had come to Moor Grange lean, scared, utterly
pathetic, with a mouth that drooped. So starved of all delight and of
all possession was Gertrude that she flushed with pleasure when she
heard that she was to have for her very own the little north room where
the telephone was now. There was such pathos in her meek withdrawal into
that little north room, that Brodrick hadn't the heart to keep her in
it. The drawing-room, he had intimated, also might be hers, when (it was
understood rather than stated) he wasn't there himself.

By that time he no longer objected to Gertrude's being all over the
place. Brodrick, though he did not know it and his sisters did, was the
sort of man