After Susan Amphlett's disappearance the house in Portland Place was given over to silence and solitude. Lady Okehampton was at Disbrowe, where she was on duty as a model grandmother, her daughters liking their children to spend the early winter in the ancestral home, where there were Exmoor ponies in abundance, and plenty of clever grooms to teach the "dear kiddies" to ride, and a superannuated governess of the "good old soul" or "dear old thing" order, to keep their young minds from rusting and coach them for their next "exam.," whether in music or science. Lady Okehampton was established in her country house till Christmas; and Claude had turf engagements and shooting engagements enough to occupy him nearly as long. He had been reluctant to leave his wife; but once away from the silent house, he had all manner of distractions to prolong his absence; and while Newmarket was full of life and anticipations for next year, the house in which he had left Vera was a place of gloom, that haunted him in troubled dreams and made the thought of return horrible. He wrote to her more than once, entreating her to let him take her to Cannes or Nice. She could have nurses and invalid carriages to make the journey possible, and her health would be renewed in the sunshine. But his wife's answer was always to the same effect: "I am at peace. Let me be." And then he fell back upon his stables and his racing friends; or his shooting in Suffolk; or on cards: any thing to stop that horror of retrospective thought, which had been like a disease with him of late years. * * * * * Vera was at peace. She had no trivial visitors, was not obliged to listen to futile chatter about other people's affairs. Dr. Tower came three or four times a week, unwilling to confide so precious a life to his "watch-dog," the general practitioner, and was cheerful and sympathetic. She had two hospital nurses now--one always on guard, day and night. She could no longer maintain her struggle for independence, for she too often needed a helping arm to support her as she went up and down the long corridors, or toiled slowly up the spacious staircase that had once been alive with the finest people in London, but where now the slender figure in a soft silk gown and white fur boa, with the nurse in cap and uniform, moved in a ghostly silence. Father Cyprian Hammond came to see her sometimes, and sat long and talked delightfully; but he, who was past master in the art of making proselytes, could get no nearer the mind of this woman than he had got a year before. Whatever her burden was, she would not open her heart to him. Whatever her sense of sin, she would not ask him for absolution. It was in vain that he told her what his Church could do for a penitent--the ineffable power possessed by that one Holy and Infallible Church to heal the wounded heart and to bring the strayed lamb back to the Shepherd's arms.