It was a quiet hour when Edgar made his appearance in the drawing-room at Berkeley Square. Why this afternoon should have been so still and domestic and the last so noisy and full of visitors, it is difficult to say. The girls had been riding in the Park in the morning, “their last ride,” as the younger ones informed him, with voluble regret. The horses were going off that evening; the whole house was, as it were, breaking to pieces. Already half the pretty things--the stands of books and of flowers--had disappeared from the tables. The girls looked somehow as if their very dresses were plainer, which was not actually the case. The cloud upon them was only a moral cloud, consequent upon the knowledge that on Monday they were all going home. “And fancy, the opera will go on all the same, and Patti will sing, though we are away,” said Mary, who was musical. “There will be just as many dances every night, and all night long, and we at Thorne!” cried Beatrice. Gussy, who looked down upon them both from the altitude of two and twenty, shook her head with a certain grandeur of superior experience. “Oh, you silly girls! if you had seen as much of it as I have! The opera is all very well, and so are the dances; but you don’t know how tiresome they get when you go on and on. Yes; it is my fourth season, Mr. Arden, and I think I have a right to be tired.” Lady Augusta gave her daughter a warning look. “The more seasons you can count the less disposed you will be to speak so very frankly of them,” she said; “but Mr. Arden has been too much with us not to know what a chatterbox you are.” “Yes,” said Edgar; “how good it has been of you to let me be so much with you. It has made town so much more pleasant to me than it could have been otherwise; and now I have come to bid you good-bye, though I am glad to think it will not be for long.” “To bid us good-bye!” they all cried, with surprise. And Lady Augusta cast another significant glance over the heads of Mary and Beatrice, who were too heedless to take any notice, at the daughter whose interests were more specially concerned. “Yes,” said Edgar; “Clare has written begging me to go to her directly. I am going on Saturday. I had no idea of it when I saw you yesterday; and after all I shall be in Lancashire before you are. I don’t even know why it is I am sent for by my sovereign Clare.” Once more a look passed between Lady Augusta and her elder girls. They did not believe one word of this story. They took it quite simply for granted that he was doing this to be near them, to be within reach of Gussy. Gussy herself even was convinced. She had doubted and shaken her head when the entire household had been persuaded of the fact. But now a little flush of gratification lighted up her cheeks. She could no longer resist the conviction that his coming and going depended somehow, as she said modestly to herself, on “us.”