"Goodness no! There are twenty rooms, and there'll be nobody but ourselves--and Oliver Wyse perhaps." "I thought Sir Oliver was coming earlier, directly we go down?" said Judith. "He's coming about the seventeenth or eighteenth; but he may stay on, of course. On the other hand he may not come, or may come later, after all." She smiled again, this time as it were to herself. Sir Oliver's visit to Hilsey had been arranged before she lunched with him in Paris and might, therefore, be subject to reconsideration--by the guest, or the hostess, or both. She had neither seen him nor heard from him since that occasion; things stood between them just where they had been left when she turned away and went into the hat-shop with glowing cheeks. There they remained even to her own mind, in a state of suspense not unpleasurable but capable of becoming difficult. It was just that possibility in them which made her brow pucker at the thought of Sir Oliver and Arthur Lisle encountering one another as fellow-guests at Hilsey. Arthur laughed. "Well, if he doesn't mind me, I don't mind him. In fact I like him very much--what I've seen of him; it isn't much." It was not much. Before Oliver Wyse went to Paris, they had met at Hill Street only three or four times, and then at large dinner parties where they had been thrown very little in contact. "Oh, of course you'll get on all right together," said Bernadette. "You've a lot in common with him really, I believe," Judith remarked. Bernadette's lips twisted in a smile and she gave Judith a glance of merry reproof. They were both amused to see how entirely the point of the observation was lost on Arthur. "I daresay we shall find we have, when we come to know each other better," he agreed in innocent sincerity. Bernadette was stirred to one of the impulses of affectionate tenderness which the absolute honesty and simplicity of his devotion now and then roused in her. His faith in her was as absolute as his adoration was unbounded. For him she was as far above frailty as she was beyond rivalry or competition. Without realising the immensity of either the faith or the adoration, she yet felt that, if temptation should come, it might help her to have somebody by her who believed in her thoroughly and as it were set her a standard to live up to. And she was unwillingly conscious that a great temptation might come--or perhaps it was better to say that she might be subjected to a severe pressure; for it was in this light rather that the danger presented itself to her mind when she was driven to think about it. She looked at him now with no shadow on her face, with all her usual radiant friendliness.