Only six days off! And the return of her “men” is only five hours off! Between these two dates how can any one be expected to keep their sanity? There would have been a better chance for her if Féodorovna had not come to stir the furnace of her misery into whitest heat, with the elegant drawing-room poker of her fatuous confession. Among preoccupations of such incomparably deeper gravity, it adds one more pang to Lavinia’s horror of herself to find that the wonder whether or how nearly Miss Prince accomplished that embrace which Lavinia looks upon as a dastardly theft upon herself, keeps a foremost place in her mind. Yet meanwhile she goes machine-like through her preparations, attending with nice accuracy to every detail that forecasting affection could plan and execute for the comfort of a dear home-coming invalid. She even carries out a little surprise--devised a while, how miraculously little a while ago!--to lighten her uncle’s sombre spirit, always specially inclined to fault-finding and depression after any small absence. And when it is finished, she regards it with a feeling of being a very Judas, inwardly classing it with his kiss, and with Jael’s draught of milk. The five hours have dwindled to four, to three, to two, to one. The time-measure has changed to that of minutes, and of even them how few are left! For the solitary “once” of its shambling existence, the 4.38 must have been punctual, and the young horse must have flown! With this last reflection mixes itself another little one, odious in its spitefulness, that perhaps Rupert is less nervous as to that animal’s shying properties when they are hidden from him by his being in the brougham, or that at all events, his superior fear of his father will hinder him from betraying alarm. Her latest thought of him before meeting is an uncharitable one; and now they are here! With her Judas-face dressed in false smiles--this is the position as inwardly classified by herself--she meets them on the doorstep. It is her betraying arm that Sir George chooses to lean upon, as he gets, with the feeble deliberation of ill-shaken-off sickness, out of the carriage. “No, no; you may be off!” he says, ungratefully pushing away his son’s gently offered aid. “You never were anything but a makeshift!” Sir George’s pleasantries have always had a disagreeable flavour, and to be known as pleasantries only by experts; but that this is meant for one neither of the young people, intimately acquainted with the hall-mark, and not for a moment to be taken in by imitations, however close, fails to recognize; so they all smile. It is on Lavinia’s left arm that her uncle is leaning--a circumstance to which is due a comment on his part which she could well have spared. “Why, your heart is knocking like a hammer! I did not know that a mosquito had a heart.”