Later he was still lying there, and she sat on a stool beside him, her head resting against his pillow, her hand in his. Suddenly he said, though he had been silent a long time: "I think if . . . I think _hers_ would have been like Anne." She understood him perfectly, because she, and she alone, knew the bitter grave where his heart was buried. "Yes . . . but he would have been less fair." She put her hand on his dark hair, and, drawing his bandaged head to her shoulder, kissed it passionately. CHAPTER XV CAVENDISH SQUARE ONCE MORE (1) For the second time that day Baptiste was distractedly polishing his silver. About every six minutes a tear rolled off his sharp nose on to salver or tankard and had to be wiped off, and the dull patch rubbed up again. Lal Khan, putting Mr. Elphinstone's bedroom to rights with long, dusky fingers, stared mournfully at a miniature propped on the dressing-table, and shook his head. And still further upstairs Mrs. Elspeth Saunders was mending stockings; her nose was red, so too her eyes. In the kitchen the cook and the rest of the domestics were discussing the situation, as they had almost unceasingly discussed it for the last few days since Elspeth's return. Her own account of what had happened they had long ago threshed bare: had thrilled to hear how, when she reached Rose Cottage at seven o'clock that fateful morning, as arranged, she had been met by one of the old ladies with the horrifying news that their guest had evidently spirited Anne-Hilarion away in the night; how, almost beside herself at this intelligence, she had suffered them to hustle her into a postchaise on a totally false scent, which caused her to traverse many miles of the county of Kent until, half-crazed and wholly destitute of money, she returned at last in sheer desperation to London, there to hear that La Vireville had already started to France in pursuit of the child. The opinion of the region was divided, some of its inmates inclining to blame Mrs. Saunders, some to commiserate. And it was either the consciousness of unjust condemnation or of her own innate superiority which kept Elspeth so much alone in the big house over which hung that piercing sense of something gone that would never, perhaps, come back again. . . . "'Twas but a few days syne A was tellin' a piece to the bairn in his bed!" Elspeth rapped her thimble suddenly against her teeth, flung down her mending, and marched downstairs. At the library door she knocked, and, receiving no answer, looked in. The room was empty and the fire burnt low. Muttering to herself anent the negligence of "yon black heathen," she made it up. There was a book open on the table, but no signs that Mr. Elphinstone had been occupied, as of custom, with his memoirs. Elspeth left the library and went to the pantry. "Where is the maister, d'ye ken?" she asked of the polisher.