isturbing her; and for awhile they sat
in silence... At last he turned again almost shyly. 'I hope some day you
will let me bring my daughter to see you.'

'Yes, yes,' said Grisel eagerly; 'we should both LOVE it, of course.
Isn't it curious?--I simply KNEW you had a daughter. Sheer intuition!'

'I say "some day,"' said Lawford; 'I know, though, that that some day
will never come.'

'Wait; just wait,' replied the quiet confident voice, 'that will come
too. One thing at a time, Mr Lawford. You've won your old self back
again; you'll win your old love of life back again in a little while;
never fear. Oh, don't I know that awful Land's End after illness; and
that longing, too, that gnawing longing, too, for Ultima Thule. So,
it's a bargain between us that you bring your daughter soon.' She busied
herself over the tea things. 'And, of course,' she added, as if it were
an afterthought, looking across at him in the pale green sunlight as she
knelt, 'you simply won't think of going back to-night.... Solitude, I
really do think, solitude just now would be absolute madness. You'll
write to-day and go, perhaps, to-morrow!'

Lawford looked across in his mind at his square ungainly house,
full-fronting the afternoon sun. He tried to repress a shudder. 'I
think, do you know, I ought to go to-day.'

'Well, why not? Why not? Just to reassure yourself that all's well. And
come back here to sleep. If you'd really promise that I'd drive you in.
I'd love it. There's the jolliest little governess-cart we sometimes
hire for our picnics. Way I? You've no idea how much easier in our minds
my brother and I would be if you would. And then to-morrow, or at any
rate the next day, you shall be surrendered, whole and in your right
mind. There, that's a bargain too. Now we must hurry.'

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Herbert himself went down to order the governess cart, and packed them
in with a rug. And in the dusk Grisel set Lawford down at the corner of
his road and drove on to an old bookseller's with a commission from her
brother, promising to return for him in an hour. Dust and a few straws
lay at rest as if in some abstruse arrangement on the stones of the
porch just as the last faint whirling gust of sunset had left them. Shut
lids of sightless indifference seemed to greet the wanderer from the
curtained windows.

He opened the door and went in. For a moment he stood in the vacant
hall; then he peeped first into the blind-drawn dining-room,