whose will had been paramount in that house,
whose word had been law, was now treated as a little child, while the
will was still as strong, the mind as keen as ever.

'She would talk to him of business,' said Mr. Horton, when he was told
of her ladyship's desire to see Steadman, 'and that cannot be allowed,
not for some little time at least.'

'She is very angry with us for refusing to obey her,' said Lady Mary.

'Naturally, but it is for her own welfare she is disobeyed. She can have
nothing to say to Steadman which will not keep till she is better. This
establishment goes by clockwork.'

Mary wished it was a little less like clockwork. Since Lady Maulevrier
had been lying upstairs--the voice which had once ruled over the house
muffled almost to dumbness--the monotony of life at Fellside had seemed
all the more oppressive. The servants crept about with stealthier tread.
Mary dared not touch either piano or billiard balls, and was naturally
seized with a longing to touch both. The house had a darkened-look, as
if the shadow of doom overhung it.

During this regimen of perfect quiet Lady Maulevrier was not allowed to
see the newspapers; and Mary was warned that in reading to her
grandmother she was to avoid all exciting topics. Thus it happened that
the account of a terrible collision between the Scotch express and a
luggage train, a little way beyond Preston, an accident in which seven
people were killed and about thirty seriously hurt, was not made known
to her ladyship; and yet that fact would have been of intense interest
and significance to her, since one of those passengers whose injuries
were fatal bore the name of Louis Asoph.

CHAPTER XVII.

'AND THE SPRING COMES SLOWLY UP THIS WAY.'

The wintry weeks glided smoothly by in a dull monotony, and now Lady
Maulevrier, still helpless, still compelled to lie on her bed or her
invalid couch, motionless as marble, had at least recovered her power of
speech, was allowed to read and to talk, and to hear what was going on
in that metropolitan world which she seemed unlikely ever to behold
again.

Lady Lesbia was still at Cannes, whence she wrote of her pleasures and
her triumphs, of flowers and sapphire sea, and azure sky, of all things
which were not in the grey bleak mountain world that hemmed in Fellside.
She was meeting many of the people whom she was to meet again next
season in the London world. She had made an informal _debut_ in a very
select ci