Miss Bussey was much relieved when the doctor pronounced her convalescent and allowed her to come downstairs. To fall ill on an outing is always exasperating, but beyond that she felt that her enforced seclusion was particularly unfortunate at the moment. Here were two young people, not engaged nor going to be engaged to one another; and for three days or more circumstances had abandoned them to an inevitable and unchaperoned tete-a-tete! Mary made light of it; she relied on the fraternal relationship, but that was, after all, a fiction, quite incapable, in Miss Bussey's opinion, of supporting the strain to which It had been subjected. Besides Mary's sincerity appeared doubtful; the kind girl, anxious to spare her aunt worry, made light of the difficulties of her position, but Miss Bussey detected a restlessness in her manner which clearly betrayed uneasiness. Here, of course, Miss Bussey was wrong; neither Mary nor John were the least self-conscious; they felt no embarrassment, but, poor creatures, wore out their spirits in a useless vigil over the letter-rack. Miss Bussey was restored to active life on the morning after the party from Cannes arrived in Paris, and she hastened to emphasize the fact of her return to complete health by the unusual effort of coming down to breakfast. She was in high feather, and her cheery conversation lifted, to some extent, the gloom which had settled on her young friends. While exhorting to patience she was full of hope, and dismissed as chimerical all the darker explanations which the disconsolate lovers invented to account for the silence their communications had met with. Under her influence the breakfast-table became positively cheerful, and at last all the three burst into a hearty laugh at one of the old lady's little jokes. At this moment Arthur Laing entered the room. His brow was clouded. He had searched his purse, his cigar-case, the lining of his hat--in fact every depository where a careful man would be likely to bestow documents whose existence he wished to remember; as no careful man would put such things in the pocket of his 'blazer', he had not searched there; thus the telegrams had not appeared, and the culprit was looking forward, with some alarm, to the reception which would await him when he 'turned up' to lunch with his friends, as he had promised to do. Hardly, however, had he sat down to his coffee when his sombre thoughts were cleared away by the extraordinary spectacle of young Mr. and Mrs. Ashforth hobnobbing with their maid, the latter lady appearing quite at home and leading the gayety and the conversation. Laing laid down his roll and his knife and looked at them in undisguised amazement.