She turned the handle of the drawing-room door, stole in, and saw with satisfaction that very little had been touched. Her improvements were still rampant. The various slips of Eastern embroidery were disposed about the furniture--awkwardly, by an unskilled, stiff hand. The piano was draped. The door of the china closet stood ajar, showing the dark floor with its gaudy rug and the daintily-finished shelves holding the still daintier family china. The curtains--those curtains which they had bought together at Liddleshorn--were drawn; the standard lamp, which had been one of his last gifts before she went away, burned steadily. There were candles alight on the high shelf--she had always insisted on candles in the drawing-room; they made such cool pin-points of steel-blue and yellow. On one side of the hearth was the one thing that she had always longed for--a cozy corner. She didn’t think that you touched the water-mark of true refinement without a cozy corner. Jethro had stoutly resisted it. Yet there it was; no home-made affair, but a perfect thing, cunningly upholstered in the most artistic style known to Regent Street. The green sofa, the green chair, were still in the bay--that bay, curtained now, through whose leaded lights she had looked--weighing the uplands thick with grain in all their beauty and plenitude with Edred’s shallow protestations of love and worldly success. Jethro was lying on the couch half asleep. She had seen him lie so on many autumn evenings when he came in tired after a day’s tramping on the farm, or in the stubble after partridges. He was dozing. She stood under the shade of the standard lamp and looked at him. He surprised her--everything did. He wore a brown velvet coat and waistcoat; his slippers had thin soles. She made an involuntary sound with her foot, and he was awake and erect in a moment, stirred like a watch-dog by the least noise. “Jethro!” she said humbly. “Pamela--Cousin Pamela! You’ve come to Folly Corner at last.” He was on his feet, at her side. He stooped and kissed her lightly, conventionally--the lukewarm kiss of a relative, to whom a kiss has no background. He seemed to regard it as the proper thing to do--proper, and perfectly safe. That matter-of-fact kiss of his made her more wildly miserable than many of Edred’s blows had done. “You’ve come!” He looked behind her, a curious, questioning glance, as if he were waiting for the second indispensable figure. But the door was closed; she offered no explanation. “How cold and wet you are!” He ran his hand down her coat. “Take that thing off. I’ll ring for tea; you could always drink tea at any moment. You see I remember--everything.” He had his hand out to the bell--bells had been added to the old place with other things. She put out her chilled hand and tapped him lightly on his hairy wrist, where the skin was so white. “Not just yet. No one saw me come in. I’m cold. I had a terrible walk.”