It was the spokesman ghillie from below, toasting the new tenant. She looked down to meet Eustace Gordon's amused eyes raised to hers; she smiled back at him, and, closing the window, returned to the fireplace. There, under the eye of fate personified in the war paddle, the phrase "go back as you came" struck her as a curious wish, perhaps even a somewhat infelicitous one, considering the discomfort of their arrival. Whereat she laughed, as she did at most things. Not all, for Lady Maud, despite many attempts, had never been able to get the whip hand of her conscience. She had to _ménager_ it by driving round anything at which she thought it likely to shy. Her marriage to Mr. Wilson had been approached in this circuitous way until its manifest advantages completely obscured the central fact that she really loved her cousin Eustace. As yet repentance had not come to her; indeed, it came hardly to one so full of common sense and worldly wisdom as she was, but it came sometimes. Once as a child it had come suddenly in the sunlit solitary room into which she had been set apart for reflection, and she had knelt down to say naïvely, "Oh, God, I'm sorry now; but please don't make me sorry again, for I don't like it." That, briefly, was still her attitude towards the ideal. She did not love her husband, but she thought him sufficiently gentlemanlike and pleasing to save herself regret. She did, or rather she had, loved Eustace, but the idea of either of them permitting that past folly to interfere with the present they had deliberately chosen was absurd. To begin with, they would see little of each other, and when they did they would carefully avoid the renewal of any confidential relations; that was the great safety in these cases; for Lady Maud viewed the matter dispassionately, as a case. She came down to dinner that evening in a pale plush teagown, with long sleeves falling back from her bare arms, and smiled at everything. At the fact that she got on perfectly without Josephine's help; at the furtive way in which Kirsty set down the dinner, as if it were a bomb, and she in a hurry to escape the explosion; at her husband's continued anxiety about the weather; at the professor's profuse apologies for having intruded on them so inopportunely. "Not at all," she said gaily; "you will make a fourth at whist; Edward loves a rubber." "I can't play to-night," replied her husband. "I've a headache." "You do look a little flushed; perhaps it is the wind." "The wind!" he echoed petulantly; "of course it's the wind. Did you ever hear anything like it, Endorwick? I swear I never slept a wink last night, what with it and that confounded sea. It is enough to drive a fellow distracted." "You are as bad as Josephine," laughed his wife. "She has been in hysterics all day until Miss Macdonald's cook gave her a whole tumbler of hot whiskey and water. Since then she has been asleep."