‘If it were mother, she would occupy all the time in begging him to wear flannels, put cork soles in all his boots, and avoid damp beds,’ said Edgar laughing. ‘Now, Daphne, put on your hat as quick as you can. It’s a lovely afternoon for a walk across the fields. If this frost continues we shall have skating presently.’ The daylight faded slowly; a bright frosty day, a clear and rosy sunset. Lina sat by the pretty hearth in her morning-room, and exactly as the clock struck five the footman brought in her dainty little tea-tray, set out the table before the fire, and lighted three or four wax-candles in the old Sèvres candelabra on the mantelpiece. Here she and her lover would be secure from the interruption of callers, which they could not be if in the drawing-room. Five minutes after the hour there came the sound of wheels upon the gravel drive, a loud ring at the bell, and in the next instant the door of the morning-room was opened, and Gerald came in, looking bulkier than usual in his furred travelling coat. ‘Dear Gerald, this is so good of you!’ said Madoline, rising to welcome him. ‘Dearest!’ he took both her hands, and stood looking at her in the firelight, with a countenance full of tenderness—a mournful tenderness—as if he were saddened by the thought of parting. ‘You are not angry with me for leaving you for a few weeks?’ ‘Angry, when you are told the change is necessary for your health! How could you think me so selfish? Let me look at you. Yes; you are looking ill—pale and wan. Gerald, you have been ill, seriously ill, perhaps, since you left here, and you would not tell me for fear of alarming me. I am sure that it is so. Your letters were so hurried, so different from——’ ‘My dear girl, you are mistaken. I told you the exact truth about myself when I owned to feeling mopish and depressed. I have had no actual illness; but I feel that a run across the Atlantic will revive and invigorate me.’ ‘And it is quite right of you to go, if the voyage is not dangerous in this weather.’ ‘Dear love, it is no more dangerous than calling a hansom to take one down Regent Street. The hansom may come to grief somehow, or there may be a gale between Liverpool and New York; but there is hardly any safer way a man can dispose of his life than to trust himself to a Cunard steamer.’ ‘And do you think you will enjoy yourself in Canada?’ ‘As much as I can enjoy myself anywhere, away from you. According to my friend Loftus, a Canadian winter is the acme of bliss; and if the winter should break up early, we may contrive to get a little run into the Hudson’s Bay country, and a glimpse of the Rockies before we come home.’ ‘That sounds as if you meant to stay rather a long time,’ said Lina, with a touch of anxiety. ‘Indeed, no, dear. At latest I shall be with you before April is half over. Think what is to happen early in May.’ ‘My coming of age. It seems so absurd to come of age at twenty-five, when one is almost an old woman.’