"For a few brief weeks in '67 it was inhabited by Maximilian and his young Empress--indeed, it is said that the Emperor still haunts the cool large rooms on the upper floor--there are but two storeys. So far I have never met his noble ghost. I should not be afraid if I did. "I am beginning to think that it is time I came back to Freshley for a while. But my plans are still uncertain." At last came solitude, and the luminous darkness of an early autumn night. Laura locked herself into her room. Yes, instinct had not played her false, for the first words of the secret letter ran:-- "Laura, I am coming home. I had meant to linger on here yet another month or six weeks, but now I ask myself each hour of the day and night--why wait? "The room in which I am sitting writing to you, thinking of you, longing for you, was the room of those two great lovers, Maximilian and his Carlotta. The ghost of their love reminds me of the transience of life. I have just walked across to the window, thinking, thinking, thinking, my beloved, of you. For I am haunted ever, Laura, by your wraith. I walk up and down the terrace wondering if you will ever be here in the body--as you already seem to be in the spirit. "I am leaving at sunrise, and in three days I shall be upon the sea. You will receive a cable, and so will my mother. The thought of seeing you again--ah, Laura, you will never know what rapture, so intense as to be almost akin to pain, that thought gives me. Lately your letters have seemed a thought more intimate, more confiding--I dare not say less cold. But I have sworn to myself, and I shall keep my oath, to ask for nothing that cannot be freely given." Two days later Laura received a wireless message saying that Oliver would be at Freshley the next day. CHAPTER XXII A year ago, almost to a day, Mrs. Tropenell had been sitting where she was sitting now, awaiting Laura Pavely. Everything looked exactly as it had looked then in the pretty, low drawing-room of Freshley Manor. Nothing had been added to, nothing withdrawn from, the room. The same shaded reading-lamp stood on the little table close to her elbow; the very chrysanthemums might have been the same. And yet with the woman sitting there everything was different! Of all the sensations--unease, anxiety, foreboding, jealousy--with which her heart had been filled this time last year, only one survived, and of that one she was secretly very much ashamed, for it was jealousy. And now she was trying with all the force of her nature to banish the ugly thing from her heart. What must be--must be! If Oliver's heart and soul, as well as the whole of his ardent, virile physical entity, desired Laura, then she, his mother, must help him, as much as lay within her power, to compass that desire.