Rumsey did not profess to understand the case, but now that Awdrey had quite come back from the borderland of insanity, he advised that ordinary remedies should immediately be resorted to; he told Margaret that in a few months her husband would be as fully and completely able to attend to the duties of life as any other man of his day and station. He did not believe, he said, that the strange attack through which Awdrey had passed was ever likely to return to him! Margaret and her husband shut up their house in town, and went abroad; they spent the winter on the continent, and day by day Awdrey's condition, both physical and mental, became more satisfactory. He slept well, he ate well; soon he began to devour books and newspapers; to absorb himself in the events of the day; to take a keen interest in politics; the member for Grandcourt died, and Awdrey put up for the constituency. He was obliged to return suddenly to England on this account, and to Margaret's delight elected to come back at once to live at the Court. The whole thing was arranged quickly. Awdrey was to be nominated as the new candidate for Grandcourt; he was to have, too, his rightful position as the Squire on his own property. Friends from all round the country rejoiced in his recovery, as they had sincerely mourned over his strange and inexplicable illness. He was welcomed with rejoicing, and came back something as a king would to take possession of his kingdom. On the night therefore, that he returned to the Court, the higher part of his being began to stir uneasily within him. He had quite agreed to Margaret's desire to invite Mrs. Everett to meet them on their return, but he read a certain expression in the widow's sad eyes, and a certain look on Hetty's face, which stirred into active remorse the conscience which had suffered more severely than anything else in the ordeal through which he had lived. It was now awake within him, and its voice was very poignant and keen; its notes were clear, sharp, and unremitting. In his excellent physical and mental health his first impulse was to defy the voice of conscience, and to live down the deed he had committed. His first wish was to hide its knowledge from all the world, and to go down to his own grave in the course of time with his secret unconfessed. He did not believe it possible, at least at first, that the moral voice within could not be easily silenced; but even on the first night of his awakening he was conscious of a change in himself. The sense of satisfaction, of complete enjoyment in life and all its surroundings which had hitherto done so much for his recovery, was now absent; he was conscious, intensely conscious, of his own hypocrisy, and he began vehemently to hate and detest himself. All the same, his wish was to hide the thing, to allow Mrs. Everett to go down to the grave with a broken heart--to allow Everett to drink the cup of suffering and dishonor to the dregs.