He was not, however, feverish in the morning, and his mind became more placid as the day went on. The two packets were safe in the drawer of the writing-table. He took them out and looked at them as a man might look at a bottle of quack medicine, clandestinely secured and kept in reserve against an emergency. He would not care to have his possession of it known, and yet there it was, should the occasion to try it occur. He felt a little happier to know that he could put his hands upon it should it be wanted--or at least a little less alarmed and nervous. And days passed on without any symptoms of cold or other illness. There was no sign or sound of these nails driven into his coffin. And the atmosphere grew more clear in the house. Anne, between whom and himself there had been an inevitable reserve and coldness, suddenly came out of that cloud, and presented herself to him the Anne of old, with all the sweetness and openness of nature. The wrong had now been accomplished, and was over, and there was a kind of generous amusement to Anne in the consternation which her sudden return to all her old habits occasioned among the people surrounding her, who knew nothing of her inner life of imaginative impulse and feeling. She took her cottage-plans into the library one morning with her old smile as if nothing had happened or could happen. The plans had been all pushed aside in the silent combat between her father and herself. Mr. Mountford could not restrain a little outburst of feeling, which had almost the air of passion. ‘Why do you bring them to me? Don’t you know you are out of it, Anne? Don’t you know I have done--what I told you I should do?’ ‘I heard that you had altered your will, papa; but that does not affect the cottagers. They are always there whoever has the estate.’ ‘Don’t you mind, then, who has the estate?’ ‘Yes, immensely,’ said Anne, with a smile. ‘I could not have thought I should mind half so much. I have felt the coming down and being second. But I am better again. You have a right to do what you please, and I shall not complain.’ He sat in his chair at his writing-table (in the drawer of which were still those two sealed packets) and looked at her with contemplative, yet somewhat abashed eyes. There was an unspeakable relief in being thus entirely reconciled to her, notwithstanding the sense of discomfiture and defeat it gave him. ‘Do you think--your sister--will be able to manage property?’ he said. ‘No doubt she will marry, papa.’ ‘Ah!’ he had not thought of this somehow. ‘She will marry, and my substance will go into the hands of some stranger, some fellow I never heard of; that is a pleasant prospect: he will be a fool most likely, whether he is an adventurer or not.’ ‘We must all take our chance, I suppose,’ said Anne, with a little tremor in her voice. She knew the adventurer was levelled at herself. ‘I suppose you have made it a condition that he shall take the name of Mountford, papa?’