"But I have let them slip--for ever."

"No, not for ever. You are young still; you have half a lifetime
before you."

"Have I?" And for the moment one would hardly have recognized the
sallow, spiritless face, that with all the delicacy of boyhood still,
at times looked so exceedingly old. "No, no, Mr. Halifax, who ever
heard of a man beginning life at seven-and-thirty?"

"Are you really seven-and-thirty?" asked Maud.

"Yes--yes, my girl. Is it so very old?"

He patted her on the shoulder, took her hand, gazed at it--the round,
rosy, girlish hand--with a melancholy tenderness; then bade "Good-bye"
to us all generally, and rode off.

It struck me then, though I hurried the thought away--it struck me
afterwards, and does now with renewed surprise--how strange it was that
the mother never noticed or took into account certain possibilities
that would have occurred naturally to any worldly mother. I can only
explain it by remembering the unworldliness of our lives at Beechwood,
the heavy cares which now pressed upon us from without, and the notable
fact--which our own family experience ought to have taught us, yet did
not--that in cases like this, often those whom one would have expected
to be most quick-sighted, are the most strangely, irretrievably,
mournfully blind.

When, the very next day, Lord Ravenel, not on horse-back but in his
rarely-used luxurious coronetted carriage, drove up to Beechwood, every
one in the house except myself was inconceivably astonished to see him
back again.

He said that he had delayed his journey to Paris, and gave no
explanation of that delay. He joined as usual in our midday dinner;
and after dinner, still as usual, took a walk with me and Maud. It
happened to be through the beech-wood, almost the identical path that I
remembered taking, years and years ago, with John and Ursula. I was
surprised to hear Lord Ravenel allude to the fact, a well-known fact in
our family; for I think all fathers and mothers like to relate, and all
children to hear, the slightest incidents of the parents' courting days.

"You did not know father and mother when they were young?" said Maud,
catching our conversation and flashing back her innocent, merry face
upon us.

"No, scarcely likely." And he smiled. "Oh, yes--it might have been--I
forget, I am not a young man now. How old were Mr. and Mrs. Halifax
when they married?"

"Father was twenty-one and mother was eighteen--only a year old