She performed the taunting travesty of an elaborate Court curtsey and passed him--a handsome, gleaming vision of satins, laces and glittering jewels--and opening the door with some noise and emphasis, she turned her head gracefully over her shoulder. Unkind laughter still lit up her face and hard, brilliant eyes. "Good-night!--farewell!" she said again, and was gone. For a moment he stood inert where she left him--then sinking into a chair he covered his face with his hands. So he remained for some time--silently wrestling with himself and his own emotions. He had to realise that at an age when he might naturally have looked for a tranquil home life--a life tended and soothed into its natural decline by the care and devotion of the wife he had undemonstratively but most tenderly loved, he was suddenly cast adrift like the hulk of an old battleship broken from its moorings, with nothing but solitude and darkness closing in upon his latter days. Then he thought of the girl,--his wife's child--the child too of his college chum and dearest friend,--he saw, impressed like a picture on the cells of his brain, her fair young face, pathetic eyes and sweet intelligence of expression,--he remembered how modestly she wore her sudden fame, as a child might wear a wild flower,--and, placed by her parentage in a difficulty for which she was not responsible, she must have suffered considerable pain and sorrow. "I will go and see her to-morrow," he said to himself--"It will be better for her to know that I have heard all her sad little history--then--if she ever wants a friend she can come to me without fear. Ah!--if only she were MY daughter!" He sighed,--his handsome old head drooped,--he had longed for children and the boon had been denied. "If she were my daughter," he repeated, slowly--"I should be a proud man instead of a sorrowful one!" He turned off the lights in the library and went upstairs to his bedroom. Outside his wife's door he paused a moment, thinking he heard a sound,--but all was silent. Imagining that he probably would not sleep he placed a book near his bedside--but nature was kind to his age and temperament, and after about an hour of wakefulness and sad perplexity, all ruffling care was gradually smoothed away from his mind, and he fell into a deep and dreamless slumber. Meanwhile Lady Blythe had been disrobed by a drowsy maid whom she sharply reproached for being sleepy when she ought to have been wide awake, though it was long past midnight,--and dismissing the girl at last, she sat alone before her mirror, thinking with some pettishness of the interview she had just had with her husband.