watched. Like this had been the crying in the night. And she had been
alone.

* * * * *

As she sat and watched she thought deeply after her lights. She did not
think only of the sweet shattered thing she so well loved. She thought
much of Lord Coombe. Being a relic of a class which may be regarded as
forever extinct, her views on the subject of the rights and
responsibilities of rank were of an unswerving reverence verging on the
feudal. Even in early days her perfection of type was rare. To her
unwavering mind the remarkable story she had become a part of was almost
august in its subjection of ordinary views to the future of a great
house and its noble name. With the world falling to pieces and great
houses crumbling into nothingness, that this one should be rescued from
the general holocaust was a deed worthy of its head. But where was there
another man who would have done this thing as he had done it--remaining
totally indifferent to the ignominy which would fall upon his memory in
the years to come when the marriage was revealed. That the explanation
of his action would always be believed to be an unseemly and shameful
one was to her respectable serving-class mind a bitter thing. That it
would always be contemptuously said that a vicious elderly man had
educated the daughter of his mistress, that he might marry her and leave
an heir of her blooming youth, was almost worse than if he had been
known to have committed some decent crime like honest murder. Even the
servants' hall in the slice of a house, discussing the ugly whisper had
somewhat revolted at it and thought it "a bit too steep even for these
times." But he had plainly looked the whole situation in the face and
had made up his mind to do what he had done. He hadn't cared for
himself; he had only cared that the child who was to be born should be
his legitimatised successor and that there should remain after him a
Head of the House of Coombe. That such houses should have heads to
succeed to their dignities was a simple reverential belief of Dowie's
and--apart from all other feeling--the charge she had undertaken wore to
her somewhat the aspect of a religious duty. His lordship was as one who
had a place on a sort of altar.

"It's because he's so high in his way that he can bear it," was her
thought. "He's so high that nothing upsets him. He's above
things--that's what he is." And there was something else too--something
she d