She roused herself at once, and began to talk with her usual eagerness and sympathy. It was a repetition of the scene before dinner. Only this time her effect was not so great. Manisty's depression did not yield. Presently, however, he looked down upon her. In the kind, concealing moonlight she was all grace and charm. The man's easy tenderness awoke. 'Eleanor--this air is too keen for that thin dress.' And stooping over her he took her cloak from her arm, and wrapped it about her. 'You lent it to Miss Foster'--he said, surveying her. 'It became her--but it knows its mistress!' The colour mounted an instant in her cheek. Then she moved further away from him. 'Have you discovered yet'--she said--'that that girl is extraordinarily handsome?' 'Oh yes'--he said carelessly--'with a handsomeness that doesn't matter.' She laughed. 'Wait till Aunt Pattie and I have dressed her and put her to rights.' 'Well, you can do most things no doubt--both with bad books, and raw girls,'--he said, with a shrug and a sigh. They bade each other good-night, and Mrs. Burgoyne disappeared through the glass door behind them. * * * * * The moon was sailing gloriously above the stone-pines of the garden. Mrs. Burgoyne, half-undressed, sat dreaming in a corner room, with a high painted ceiling, and both its windows open to the night. She had entered her room in a glow of something which had been half torment, half happiness. Now, after an hour's dreaming, she suddenly bent forward and, parting the cloud of fair hair that fell about her, she looked in the glass before her, at the worn, delicate face haloed within it--thinking all the time with a vague misery of Lucy Foster's untouched bloom. Then her eyes fell upon two photographs that stood upon her table. One represented a man in yeomanry uniform; the other a tottering child of two. 'Oh! my boy--my darling!'--she cried in a stifled agony, and snatching up the picture, she bowed her head upon it, kissing it. The touch of it calmed her. But she could not part from it. She put it in her breast, and when she slept, it was still there. CHAPTER III 'Eleanor--where are you off to?' 'Just to my house of Simmon,' said that lady, smiling. She was standing on the eastern balcony, buttoning a dainty grey glove, while Manisty a few paces from her was lounging in a deck-chair, with the English newspapers. 'What?--to mass? I protest. Look at the lake--look at the sky--look at that patch of broom on the lake side. Come and walk there before _déjeuner_--and make a round home by Aricia.' Mrs. Burgoyne shook her head.