Lady Fareham came running towards them in advance of children and friends, an airy figure in blue and white, her fair hair flying in the wind, her arms stretched out as if to greet them from afar. She clasped her sister to her breast even before she saluted her husband, clasped her and kissed her, laughing between the kisses. “Welcome, my escaped nun!” she cried. “I never thought they would let thee out of thy prison, or that thou wouldst muster courage to break thy bonds. Welcome, and a hundred times, welcome. And that thou shouldst have nursed and tended my ailing lord! Oh, the wonder of it! While I, within a hundred miles of him, knew not that he was ill, here didst thou come across seas to save him! Why, ’tis a modern fairy tale.” “And she is the good fairy,” said Fareham, taking his wife’s face between his two hands and bending down to kiss the white forehead under its cloud of pale golden curls, “and you must cherish her for all the rest of your life. But for her I should have died alone in that great gaudy house, and the rats would have eaten me, and then perhaps you would have cared no longer for the mansion, and would have had to build another further west, by my Lord Clarendon’s, where all the fine folks are going—and that would have been a pity.” “Oh, Fareham, do not begin with thy irony-stop! I know all your organ tones, from the tenor of your kindness to the bourdon of your displeasure. Do you think I am not glad to have you here safe and sound? Do you think I have not been miserable about you since I knew of your sickness? Monsieur de Malfort will tell you whether I have been unhappy or not.” “Why, Malfort! What wind blew you hither at this perilous season, when Englishmen are going abroad for fear of the pestilence, and when your friend St Evremond has fled from the beauties of Oxford to the malodorous sewers and fusty fraus of the Netherlands?” “I had no fear of the contagion, and I wanted to see my friends. I am in lodgings in Oxford, where there is almost as much good company as there ever was at Whitehall.” The Comte de Malfort and Fareham clasped hands with a cordiality which bespoke old friendship; and it was only an instinctive recoil on the part of the Englishman which spared him his friend’s kisses. They had lived in camps and in courts together, these two, and had much in common, and much that was antagonistic, in temperament and habits, Malfort being lazy and luxurious, when no fighting was on hand; a man whose one business, when not under canvas, was to surpass everybody else in the fashion and folly of the hour, to be quite the finest gentleman in whatever company he found himself.