"I shall never be happy again," said the tired voice, with a sob. "We all say that at eighteen; it comforts us sometimes to be the most miserable person in the world. Then we turn round a bit, and the sun comes out again, and some one gives us a tonic, and we endow a cot at the hospital, or give a farthing meal to five hundred brats in the East End, and then we go on again. You have never been in love before, of course?" "Don't," moaned the other from the corner of the unsympathetic sofa. The clear calm tones of her Mentor softened a little. "I don't want to hurt you, Norah; I only mean that if you go in for loving once in a lifetime and that sort of thing, you really cannot properly understand the utter insouciance of an emotional man like Digby. He will love you more than ever now that you have come back, and you will be ten times happier than if you had been married straight off without any drawbacks. You have got rid of your ideals, to begin with, which most of them do not accomplish until after marriage, and that is always a risk. And you will find there is lots of time to be happy." "Oh," said the other, in an altered tone, sitting upright, and speaking with startling emphasis, "and do you really mean to say that you think I should marry him _now_?" Lady Joan did not turn a hair, vulgarly speaking; she felt she had done wonders already by getting rid of the battered, hopeless little voice, and she merely smiled to herself in the twilight in a triumphant, self-satisfied manner. "You are to come home with me now, and I will send down for your maid, and you shall stay the night and get rested. I suppose you have eaten nothing for hours? Then how can you expect to take a proper view of things? Half the troubles of life come from a bad digestion; it's not romantic, but then I don't belong to your musical set." And she carried Norah off through the back door, leaving Mrs. Haxtell with material for a year's gossip, and a note for the musician to the effect that he was to come up to the Court after dinner and give them some music. "That is the cleverest woman I know," he sputtered, as he plunged his head into a basin of cold water after reading the scrawled scrap of paper. And he added grimly, "I suppose she will tell me which one I am to marry. And I am not in a position to object." But he felt grateful to her for asking him in such a commonplace sort of way, and he put the song he had been writing into the pocket of his Inverness coat, and walked up to the Court in the dusk.