It was pleasant to have him there--a welcome change from Hartledon's recent monotony; and even Maude, with her boasted dislike, felt prejudice melting away. Boasted dislike, not real, it had been. None could dislike Percival. He was not Edward, and it was him Maude had loved. Percival she never would love, but she might learn to like him. As he sat near her, in his plain black morning attire, courteous, genuinely sweet-tempered, his good looks conspicuous, a smile on his delicate, refined, but vacillating lips, and his honest dark-blue eyes bent upon her in kindness, Maude for the first time admitted a vision of the possible future, together with a dim consciousness that it might not be intolerable. Half the world, of her age and sex, would have deemed it indeed a triumph to be made the wife of that attractive man. He had cautiously stood aside for Lady Kirton to take the head of the table; but the dowager had positively refused, and subsided into the chair at the foot. She did not fill it in dear Edward's time, she said; neither should she in dear Val's; he had come home to occupy his own place. And oh, thank goodness he was come! She and Maude had been so lonely and miserable, growing thinner daily from sheer _ennui_. So she faced Lord Hartledon at the end of the table, her flaxen curls surmounted by an array of black plumes, and looking very like a substantial female mute. "What an awful thing that is about the Rectory!" exclaimed she, when they were more than half through dinner. Lord Hartledon looked up quietly. "What is the matter at the Rectory?" "Fever has broken out." "Is that all!" he exclaimed, some amusement on his face. "I thought it must have taken fire." "A fever's worse than a fire." "Do you think so?" "_Think so!_" echoed the dowager. "You can run away from a fire; but a fever may take you before you are aware of it. Every soul in the Rectory may die; it may spread to the parish; it may spread here. I have kept tar burning outside the house the last two days." "You are not serious, Lady Kirton!" "I am serious. I wouldn't catch a fever for the whole world. I should die of fright before it had time to kill me. Besides--I have Maude to guard. You were forgetting her." "There's no danger at all. One of the servants became ill after they returned home, and it proved to be fever. I don't suppose it will spread." "How did _you_ hear about it?" "From Miss Ashton. She mentioned it in her last letter to me." "I didn't know you corresponded with her," cried the dowager, her tones rather shrill. "Not correspond with Miss Ashton!" he repeated. "Of course I do." The old dowager had a fit of choking: something had gone the wrong way, she said. Lord Hartledon resumed.