Sir Paget insisted—certainly not to the displeasure of Mr. Stannard—on “wetting the signatures” with a bottle of his Pommery 1900. Nina just wetted her lips—even to that vintage she could condescend. Then we all strolled out into the garden, while tea was preparing. There was the old place—the high cliffs above it, one narrow wooded ledge fronting the sea; scant acres, but, as it were, with all our blood in them. I felt like a usurper (in spite of the honest money that I was paying), the younger branch ousting the elder, even through an abdication. But I was a usurper happy and content—as, I daresay, they often are, in spite of the poets and the dramatists. Sir Paget and Stannard paired off; Godfrey and Eunice; Waldo sat down on the bench by the door and lit his pipe; I found myself left with Nina Dundrannan. With the slightest motion of her hand she invited me to accompany her along the walk towards the shrubbery. At once I knew that she meant to say something to me, though I had not the least idea on what lines her speech might run. She could be very candid—had she not been once, long ago, she the “skeleton at the feast”? She could also put the truth very decisively in its proper place—a remote one. Fires burnt in her—I knew that; but who could tell when the flames would show? There was a seat placed where a gap in the trees gave a view of the sea; here we sat down together. With her usual resoluteness she began at once with what she had made up her mind to say. “Waldo didn’t show me Sir Paget’s note, but he told me a piece of news about you which it gave him; he gave me to understand that you and Sir Paget thought that I, as well as he himself, should know it. He told me that the arrangement was no longer repugnant to his own feelings, although it once would have been; he felt both able and willing to ignore the past, and start afresh on terms of friendship with Madame Valdez—with Lucinda. He asked me what my feelings were. I said that in my view that was hardly the question; I had married into the Rillington family; any lady whom Sir Paget and he, the heads of the family, were prepared to accept and welcome as a member of it, would, as a matter of course, be accepted by me; I should treat her, whenever we met, with courtesy, as I should no doubt be treated by her; a great degree of affection, I reminded Waldo, was not essential or invariable between relations-in-law.” Here Lady Dundrannan smiled for a moment. “Least of all should I desire that any supposed feelings of mine should interfere with the family arrangement about Cragsfoot which you all three felt to be desirable; the more so as it had in a way originated with myself, since, if I had wished to make this place our principal residence, the present plan would never have been thought of at all. So I told him to put me entirely out of the question; he would be quite safe in feeling sure that I should accept the situation with a good grace.”