“You consent,” she said, with hardly a touch of triumph in her voice, “that I should live with you as my mother lived with my father?” And at Robert Grimshaw’s minute gesture of assent: “Oh, well, my dear,” she continued quite gently, “it’s obvious to me that you’re more than touched by this little Pauline of ours. I don’t say that I resent it. I don’t suggest that it makes you care for me any less than you should or did, but I’m sure, perfectly sure, of the fact such as it is, and I’m sure, still more sure, that she cares extremely for you. So that ...” She had been looking down at Dudley Leicester’s forehead, but she looked up again into Robert Grimshaw’s eyes. “I think, my dear,” she said slowly, “as a precaution, I think you cannot have me on those terms; I think you had better”--she paused for the fraction of a minute--“marry me,” and her fingers began to work slowly upon Dudley Leicester’s brows. There was the least flush upon her cheeks, the least smile round the corners of her lips, she heaved the ghost of a sigh. “So that you get me both ways,” Robert Grimshaw said; and his hands fell desolately open at his side. “Every way and altogether,” she answered. EPISTOLARY EPILOGUE “IT was a summer evening four years later when, upon the sands of one of our most fashionable watering-places, a happy family group, consisting of a buxom mother and several charming children, might have been observed to disport itself. Who can this charming matron be, and who these lovely children, designated respectively Robert, Dudley, Katya, and Ellida? “And who is this tall and robust gentleman who, wearing across the chest of his white cricketing flannel the broad blue ribbon of His Majesty’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, bearing in one hand negligently the _Times_ of the day before yesterday and in the other a pastoral rake, approaches from the hayfields, and, with an indulgent smile, surveys the happy group? Taking from his mouth his pipe--for in the _dolce far niente_ of his summer vacation, when not called upon by his duties near the Sovereign at Windsor, he permits himself the relaxation of the soothing weed--he remarks: “‘The Opposition fellows have lost the by-election at Camber.’ “Oblivious of his pipe, the charming matron casts herself upon his neck, whilst the children dance round him with cries of congratulation, and the trim nurses stand holding buckets and spades with expressions of respectful happiness upon their countenances. Who can this be?