“Oh, _of course_ I interest myself in you. Who should I interest myself in?” cried Janet, “above everything! And that is why I say don’t meddle with them; don’t have anything to do with them. Oh, when you have a father that will give you whatever you like; when you have your pockets full of money; when, if you just wait a little, you will have a title, and everything heart could desire--_why_ should you go a long sea voyage, and mix yourself up with a parcel of working men?” “_Why?_” cried Janet, with a wonderment that was slightly mingled with scorn, yet was impassioned in its vehemence. “I would not demean myself like that, not for all the world.” Paul stood and looked at her almost moved to laughter by the strangeness of the position. Spears’s daughter! but the laughter would not have been sweet. That strange paradox, and the still stranger one of his own meeting with his supposed love under the lamp-post, filled him with the profoundest mortification, wonder, and yet amusement. It seemed beyond the power of belief, and yet it was true. CHAPTER X. Sir William was better when he got home. When he reached his own house he began to hold up his head, to hold himself, if not erect as of old, yet in a way more like himself. He walked firmly into the house, always with Fairfax’s arm, and said, “I am better, Brown; yes, much better,” when Brown met him, very anxious and effusive, at the door. “I feel almost myself,” he said, turning round to Lady Markham. And so he looked--himself ten years older, but yet with something of the old firmness and precise composure. How he could thus recover, though the letter in his pocket-book bore the postmark of Markham Royal, and he had come back into the very presence of the danger which at a distance had overwhelmed him, it would be difficult to tell. “He’s picked up wonderful,” Mr. Jarvis, Sir William’s own man, said to Mr. Brown; “but for all that, he’s got notice to quit--he have. Just see if I ain’t right.” Mrs. Fry was of the same opinion when she saw her master. She had never had any comfort in her mind, she declared, since she heard of these faintings. All the Markhams went like that. The late Sir Paul had done just the same--nothing to speak of at first, and nobody alarmed--but it was a thing that went fast, that was, Mrs. Fry said. They were all very gloomy about Sir William down stairs, but in the family there was no such alarm. He put away his trouble, or rather, as he emerged out of the suffering of his attack into physical comfort again, and no longer felt the blood ebbing, as it were, from his heart, and consciousness failing in the giddy void into which he had seemed to sink, nature in him declined to remember it, turned away from it. The familiar house, the waving of the woods, the stately quiet about him, healed him, and he would not allow himself to be pulled back. He came to dinner, and occupied his place as usual, looking really, his wife and daughter thought, almost quite himself.