The girl went to the window and watched Nelly sweep out to her carriage as if nothing could ever happen to her. The sight of the servants and of the few passers-by had restored her in a moment to herself. Frances stood and pondered for some time at the window. Nelly’s was an agitating figure to burst into her quiet life. She did not need the lesson it taught; but yet it filled her with trouble and awe. This brilliant surface of Society, what tragedies lay underneath! She scarcely dared to follow the young wife in imagination to her home; but she felt with her the horror of the approaching death, the dread interval when the event was coming, the still more dread moment after, when, all shrinking and trembling in her youth and loneliness, she would have to live side by side with the dead, whom she had never loved, to whom no faithful bond had united her---- It was not till another carriage drew up and some one got out of it that Frances retreated, with a very different sort of alarm, from the window. It was some one coming to call, she did not see whom, one of those wonderful people who came to talk over with her mother other people whom Frances did not know. How was she to find any subject on which to talk to them? Her anxiety was partially relieved by seeing that it was Claude who came in. He explained that Lady Someone had dropped him at the door, having picked him up at some other place where they had both been calling. “There is a little east in the wind,” he said, pulling up the collar of his coat: “Was that Nelly Winterbourn I saw driving away from the door? I thought it was Nelly. And when he is dying, with not many hours to live----!” “And why should not she come to mamma?” said Frances. “She has no mother of her own.” “Ah,” said Ramsay, looking at her keenly, “I see what you mean. She has no mother of her own; and therefore she comes to Markham’s, which is next best.” “I said, to my mother,” said Frances, indignantly. “I don’t see what Markham has to do with it.” “All the same, I shouldn’t like my wife to be about the streets, going to--any one’s mother, when I was dying.” “It would be right enough,” cried Frances, hot and indignant, “if you had married a woman who did not care for you.” She forgot, in the heat of her partisanship, that she was admitting too much. But Claude did not remember, any more than she. “Oh, come,” he said, “Miss Waring, Frances. (May I call you Frances? It seems unnatural to call you Miss Waring, for, though I only saw you for the first time a little while ago, I have known you all your life.) Do you think it’s quite fair to compare me to Winterbourn? He was fifty when he married Nelly, a fellow quite used up. At all events, I am young, and never was fast; and I don’t see,” he added, pathetically, “why a woman shouldn’t be able to care for me.” “Oh, I did not mean that,” cried Frances, with penitence; “I only meant----”