Her heart failed her; she could not give him further warning. Words would not come to her significant enough without being blunt and plain; that again she neither could nor would be. Something of her malice revived in her; if he could not see, he must remain blind--till the flash of the tempest smote light even into his eyes. It must be so. She gave a little shrug of her shoulders. "A mood, I suppose! Just as I had a mood this morning--and, as you say, for no particular reason!" CHAPTER XVIII GOING TO RAIN! The departure of the Norton Wards and Sir Christopher on Monday morning left Arthur alone with the family party at Hilsey Manor. To live alone with a family is a different thing from being one of a party of visitors. The masks are off; the family life is seen more intimately, the household politics reveal themselves to the intelligent outsider. During the days which intervened between his own arrival and that of Oliver Wyse, Arthur's eyes were opened to several things; and first of all to the immense importance of Judith Arden in the household. He soon found himself wondering how it got on at all in the winter, when she was not there; he had not yet known his cousins through a winter. She was in touch with all three of them; her love for animals and outdoor things made her in sympathy with the little girl; her cheerfulness and zest for enjoyment united her with Bernadette; her dry and satiric humour, as well as her interest in books, appealed to Godfrey's temper. Thus she served, as she herself had hinted to Arthur, as an intermediary, an essential go-between; she was always building bridges and filling up chasms, trying to persuade them that they had more in common than they thought, trying to make them open their hearts to one another, and distributing herself, so to say, among them in the way best calculated to serve these ends. Arthur soon observed with amusement that she aimed at distributing him also fairly among the family--now assigning him to Margaret, now contriving for him a walk with Godfrey, then relinquishing him to Bernadette for a while, and thus employing him, as she employed herself, as a link; their common liking for him was to serve as a bond of union. It was the task of a managing woman, and he would have said that he hated managing women. But it was impossible to hate Judith; she set about her task with so much humour, and took him into her confidence about it not so much in words as by quick amused glances which forbade him to resent the way she was making use of him. Very soon he was sympathising with her and endeavouring to help in her laudable endeavour after family unity.