She has gone too far! Imagination strikes work; confessing its utter inability to represent her future husband as prostrated by a wound received in battle! She walks on, quickening her pace, and vaguely irritated with herself. It was a senseless and mischievous exercise of fancy, and she had no business to indulge in it. CHAPTER VIII The spring--or is it the spring?--has been playing its genial game with Mrs. Prince, too, as is evident by the restored importance of her gait, as she sweeps out of the orchid-house, whither Lavinia has pursued her, and by the smoothed and satisfied visage--changed, indeed, from that which she had worn two months ago in announcing her daughter’s mysterious correspondence with the Cavalry Officer Commanding at Canterbury--which she turns towards her visitor. “Did you walk,” she asks, “this warm day? Sir George wanted the horses, I suppose? It must be awkward having only one pair. If I had known, I should have been so delighted to send for you!” There is sincere welcome in words and voice, coupled with that touch of patronage which--as employed towards a member of the oldest and somewhile most important family of the countryside, Mrs. Prince and Lavinia have--before the former’s parental woes had made both forget it--found respectively so agreeable and so galling. “Thanks, but I like walking.” “Féo will be here in a minute. I told them to let her know the moment you arrived. She is with her patients! She is never anywhere else now! Thrown up all her engagements; devotes herself wholly to them.” It is clear that, in pre-Candle days, Mrs. Prince had said “’olly;” but the victory over the early infirmity is so complete as to be marked only by an intensity of aspirate unknown to those whose _h_’s have grown up with them. “It is certainly the most unobjectionable craze she has ever had!” replies Lavinia, whose withers are still slightly wrung by the allusion to her horselessness; and who is reflecting how much less under-bred a thing adversity is than prosperity. “When I say ‘patients,’” pursues Mrs. Prince, not in the least offended by, in fact, not hearing, Miss Carew’s observation, “I ought to put it in the singular; for I must own she does not take much notice of poor Smethurst”--pausing to laugh; then, proceeding in a tone of wondering admiration, “Isn’t it astonishing what they do in the way of surgery now? Nurse Blandy tells me that they are going--the doctors, I mean--to make him a new end to his nose, and turn his lip inside out, and I don’t know what all!” “Poor creature! How terrible!”--shuddering.