To all outward appearance she was well and cheerful, and spent her time much as usual--helping her mother and visiting her poor people in the morning, and in the afternoon attending cricket matches or playing tennis at the various garden-parties of the season. The nine days' wonder about the Blakes' sudden disappearance was over, and the Rutherford ladies no longer whispered strange tales into each other's ears--each more marvellous than the last. It was said and believed by more than one person that Audrey's engagement had been broken off because Dr. Ross had discovered that there was hereditary insanity in the Blake family; indeed, one lady--a notorious gossip, and who was somewhat deaf--was understood to say that she had heard Mrs. Blake was at that moment in a private lunatic asylum. That Audrey Ross did not take her broken engagement much to heart was the general opinion in Rutherford. Would a girl play tennis, dance, or organise picnics, they said, if she were languishing in heart-sickness?--and there was certainly no appearance of effort in the readiness with which Audrey responded to any plan that her young friends proposed. As they remarked, 'Audrey Ross was always up to fun.' But Michael Burnett could have told them a different story if they had asked him. Audrey's sweet, sound disposition made her peculiarly alive to a sense of duty. 'One must think of other people, always and under all circumstances,' she had said to him when her trouble was fresh upon her, and he knew that she was only acting up to her words. She would play because other people wished to play, not because her heart was in it. During his brief visits to Woodcote they were always together, and more than once he told himself that he could see a great change in her. She had at times a tired, burdened look, as though weary thoughts were habitual to her. But she never spoke to him of Cyril, or questioned him in any way. He would tell her unasked about Mollie, and now and then he would drop a word casually about Cyril. 'I met Blake the other day,' he would say. 'I think he looks better, though he says the hot weather tries him; he is getting on with his work, and appears to like it.' Or another time: 'I dined with Unwin last week; he and Blake seem to hit it off famously. Unwin says he has far more discrimination and intelligence than other young men of his age, and that for steadiness and application he might be fifty. But he thinks he ought to take more exercise; his hard work and the heat together are making him thin.' Audrey remembered this speech of Michael's, as, a month later on, she sat on the Whitby sands. She had yielded to Geraldine's persuasion to accompany them to the seaside. Dr. Ross and his wife were paying visits in Cumberland, Michael was in North Wales with an artist friend, and Audrey had accepted her sister's invitation very willingly.