How deep is Lavinia’s thankfulness that Miss Prince’s ignorance of this irregular interview saves her from the awful necessity of at once accounting for and relating it. She reaches her own room, trembling and unstrung. So complete has been her fidelity to Rupert, unconscious of the unusual in its absoluteness, that no man has ever before kissed even her hand, the hand which is so often a wicket-gate leading to the palace of the lips. By the electric light she looks at her right hand--it was the right--which has been desecrated, is it? or for ever ennobled?--her practical, capable right hand, beautiful in shapely strength; and her first feeling is one of regret that it is not more satin-soft, more smoothly worthy of his lips. Shame that at such a crisis--for to her inexperience it seems one--so unworthy an impulse should predominate, burns hotly. But, all the same, the regret holds its own, and keeps its original start. The “dazzled morning moon” and the uprising sun find her still a watcher. “I have lost a whole night’s sleep because a sick man kissed my hand out of gratitude,” she says to herself, when her eyes at length close upon the already roseing clouds. “That is sensible!” Waking brings with it a healthier view of the episode that had cost her such a vigil--brings an effort to deride herself for attaching so much importance to what was doubtless a very commonplace form of acknowledgment. Her yesterday’s explanation returns with a certain power of soothing upon her conscience. It showed more than doubtful taste in her to volunteer it; but, at all events, he now knows that her marriage with Rupert is an unalterable certainty, and that lover-love has no part in it. Why it should be unendurable to leave an acquaintance of a fortnight’s standing under the belief that she is influenced by the ordinary motives, she omits to asks herself. But it is with a brave face of open friendliness that she presents herself at his bedside, and he asks himself by what juggle it had seemed to him that last night her spirit had kissed his in the moonlight. In the afternoon she returns to Campion Place, bidding her patient good-bye with staid kindness, but making no mention of a possible return. She is on the doorstep, with a bright face to welcome back “her men.” The young horse, which Sir George is driving, shies badly at barking Geist, with a foolish pretence of not recognizing him as his own family dog; and Lavinia would give anything that her eyes had not flown suspiciously to Rupert, to note whether his hand is nervously gripping the side of the dog-cart.