He went, half unwillingly. She stood for a few moments, fixed to the spot where he had left her, as if lost in some awful dream, and then walked dizzily to the adjoining room, where she tried to wash the ashy pallor from her cheeks with cold spring water. She rearranged her hair, with hands that trembled despite her endeavour to be calm; changed her dress—fastened a scarlet _coque_ in her dark hair, and went down to the dining-room, looking a little wan and fatigued, but not less lovely than she was wont to look. What a mad world it seemed to her when she saw her guests assembled at the oval table, talking and laughing in that easy unreserved way which seems natural at the mid-day meal, when servants are banished, and gentlemen perform the onerous office of carver at the loaded sideboard; when hungry people, just returned from long rambles over hills and banks where the wild thyme grows, or from a desperate croquet match, or a gallop across the moorland, devour a heterogeneous meal of sirloin, perigord pie, clotted cream, fruit, cutlets, and pastry, and drink deeper draughts of that sparkling Devonian cider, better a hundred times than champagne, than they would quite care to acknowledge, if a reckoning were demanded of them. Everybody seemed especially noisy to-day—talk, flirtation, laughter, made a Babel-like hubbub—and at the end of the table sat the Squire of Penwyn, calm, inscrutable, and no line upon the expansive forehead, with its scanty border of crisp, brown hair, showed the brand of Cain. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XVII ‘AH, LOVE, THERE IS NO BETTER LIFE THAN THIS.’ JUSTINA had made a success at the Royal Albert Theatre. The newspapers were tolerably unanimous in their verdict. The more æsthetic and critical journals even gave her their approval, which was a kind of _cachet_. The public, always straightforward and single-minded in their expression of satisfaction, had no doubt about her. She was accepted at once as one of the most popular and promising young actresses of the day—natural yet artistic—free from all trick, unaffected, modest, yet with the impulsive boldness of a true artist, who forgets alike herself and her audience in the unalloyed delight of her art.