The summer of which François Fontenelle had spoken to his friend, as he sat beneath Anne’s portrait, was the summer which followed her visit to her brother and his wife. Anne had returned with her inner life wrecked and shattered. Her peace of mind was gone. She spent no more quiet days in the library with her books. A feverish restlessness drove her out of doors, where while daylight lasted, she worked among her plants, digging, weeding, planting with such energy that from sheer physical fatigue, she forced herself to sleep dreamlessly till morning renewed her toil. She was uninterrupted. No one disturbed her. She had nothing else to do. In spite of her protestations, Mrs. Burbage who had been growing steadily feebler through the winter, sent for a hospital nurse, and finally kept her bed. “I will be looked after by the right people,” she declared with characteristic determination. “Trained nurses are the right people to tend the sick. I can afford to pay for them, and I will have them. You have had enough waiting upon invalids, my dear.” Freed from nearly all her customary duties, therefore, Anne had the long spring days before her, and with the instinct of her healthy nature, she strove by hard physical work, to fill them, and at the same time to crush out the mental malady which tore at her heart. “It’s a disease, but work will kill it,” she told herself. And she set her teeth, and worked. She worked; but she was burdened with a great fear and a great regret. Immersed in books, as for the last five years she had become, she had not hitherto noticed the isolation, the narrowness of her life. Not only had she failed to miss the intercourse of her fellow creatures, she had actually dreaded their approach. Filled with a nervous mistrust of her own power to please, she had shunned humanity as represented by any living soul outside the gates of Fairholme Court. “I know nothing about any one,” was the dreary burden of her thoughts. “I don’t understand anything about real men and women. My own life is empty, and so for me, the lives of others are empty too. I have nothing to say to them, no help to give them, I’m useless in a world of which I know nothing except at second hand. And as I grow older my heart will dry up and wither more and more, till I’m an old maid--the conventional old maid.” She planted her sad thoughts with the beds of lilies; she dug them into the ground round the rose-bushes; and serenely, mockingly, the garden flourished and broke gradually into a flood of bloom. It had never looked so beautiful as on the day when Mrs. Burbage’s maid came to her while she was watering the new rose hedge round the sundial, to say that visitors had called, and her mistress wished Miss Page to receive them.