But having made her declaration, Lady Ellington thought she had better be moving. From a child Madge had been blessed with a memory of hideous exactitude, which enabled her, if she choose, to recall conversations with the most convincing verbal accuracy, and Lady Ellington did not feel equal, off-hand, to explaining some of those flower-like phrases which had, she felt certain, fallen from her in her interview with Madge after the thunderstorm in the New Forest, if perchance the fragrance of them might conceivably still linger in her daughter's mind. Nor did she wish to be reminded, however remotely (and as she thought of this she made the greater speed) of the letter from Madge to Evelyn which had lain in the hall one afternoon as she came in, with regard to which her maternal instinct had prompted her to take so strong a line. So she again referred to the lateness of the hour, "all owing to those amusing games," and took the rest of her hot water to finish in her own room. But she need not have been afraid; nothing was further from Madge's intention than to speak of such things, and though she could not help knowing that she did not believe what her mother had said, she deliberately turned her mind away, and so far from exercising her memory over the grounds of her disbelief, she put it all away from her thoughts. Such generosity was easy, her present great happiness made it that. She felt in no mood to go to bed, even after the night she had spent in the train, and from the thought of the vain disquietude she had felt about how people would behave to them, she passed in thought to another disquietude that she told herself was as likely to be as vain as that. For what was the sense of measuring and gauging and taking soundings into the manner of Evelyn's love for her, and comparing it unfavourably, to tell the truth, with hers for him? For she knew quite well, the whole fibre of her being knew, that in so far as he was complete at all, his love for her was complete; there were no reservations in it; he loved her with all his soul and strength. Yet when the best thing in the world was given her, here she was turning it over, and wondering, so to speak, if the ticket to show its price was still on it, and if it was decipherable! It is ill to look thus at any gift, but when that gift is the gift of love, which is without money and without price, such a deed is little short, so she told herself now, of a desecration. * * * * *