There was a pause, during which the butler brought in fresh griddle-cakes, replenished the hot milk, and withdrew. As the door closed on him, Mrs. Mant said, with a dangerous cordiality: “No one would misunderstand your receiving an old friend of your husband’s ... like Mr. Prest.” Lizzie Hazeldean cast a sharp glance at the large empty mysterious face across the table. They _wanted_ her to receive Henry Prest, then? Ah, well ... perhaps she understood.... “Shall I answer this for you, my dear? Or will you?” Mrs. Mant pursued. “Oh, as you like. But don’t fix a day, please. Later--” Mrs. Mant’s face again became vacuous. She murmured: “You must not shut yourself up too much. It will not do to be morbid. I’m sorry to have to leave you here alone--” Lizzie’s eyes filled: Mrs. Mant’s sympathy seemed more cruel than her cruelty. Every word that she used had a veiled taunt for its counterpart. “Oh, you mustn’t think of giving up your visit--” “My dear, how can I? It’s a _duty_. I’ll send a line to Henry Prest, then.... If you would sip a little port at luncheon and dinner we should have you looking less like a ghost....” * * * * * Mrs. Mant departed; and two days later--the interval was “decent”--Mr. Henry Prest was announced. Mrs. Hazeldean had not seen him since the previous New Year’s day. Their last words had been exchanged in Mrs. Struthers’s crimson boudoir, and since then half a year had elapsed. Charles Hazeldean had lingered for a fortnight; but though there had been ups and downs, and intervals of hope when none could have criticised his wife for seeing her friends, her door had been barred against everyone. She had not excluded Henry Prest more rigorously than the others; he had simply been one of the many who received, day by day, the same answer: “Mrs. Hazeldean sees no one but the family.” Almost immediately after her husband’s death she had sailed for Europe on a long-deferred visit to her father, who was now settled at Nice; but from this expedition she had presumably brought back little comfort, for when she arrived in New York her relations were struck by her air of ill-health and depression. It spoke in her favour, however; they were agreed that she was behaving with propriety. She looked at Henry Prest as if he were a stranger: so difficult was it, at the first moment, to fit his robust and splendid person into the region of twilight shades which, for the last months, she had inhabited. She was beginning to find that everyone had an air of remoteness; she seemed to see people and life through the confusing blur of the long crape veil in which it was a widow’s duty to shroud her affliction. But she gave him her hand without perceptible reluctance. He lifted it toward his lips, in an obvious attempt to combine gallantry with condolence, and then, half-way up, seemed to feel that the occasion required him to release it. “Well--you’ll admit that I’ve been patient!” he exclaimed.