By the time November came round again, Cecily’s life had settled down to a more or less steady routine. She gave the mornings to her work, and her book was growing. Her afternoons, and many evenings, were taken up by social duties and occasional pleasures. With the persistence of a patient going through a prescribed cure, she contrived that no hour of her time should be unoccupied. She cultivated her natural gifts as a clever hostess, and began to entertain. Her little parties were popular, for like her father, who in his time had been a famous host, she possessed an instinct for the right people, and it began to be assumed that at Mrs. Kingslake’s one would at least escape a dull evening. Sometimes her husband was present; more often he was away; but he encouraged the parties, and gradually Cecily grew accustomed to knowing as little of his engagements as if he were a stranger. Philippa had not taken up her duties as secretary until their return to town in the autumn after a holiday which Cecily had spent with Diana by the sea, and Robert abroad, whence he had written occasional letters, vague in tone as well as address. The two women scarcely ever met. At ten o’clock, when Philippa went to Robert’s study, Cecily was at work in her own room, whence she did not emerge till after the secretary’s hour for departure. With all her strength she strove to forget her presence in the house, and the effort, at first apparently impossible, became at last no effort at all. Gradually her work absorbed her; gradually she began to live in another world of her own creating, often so completely that she woke with a start to the consciousness of her outward existence, in so far as it was connected at all with her husband. It was of the strangeness of this she had been thinking one afternoon as she walked through St. James’s Park on her way home. It was the hour of twilight, that hour which, in the autumn and in London, has a magic past the power of words. The dusky red of sunset lingered, and burned solemnly through that swimming purple haze which London draws like a veil softly over its parks, its squares, its ugliest streets, turning to velvet softness the outlines of church, palace, or factory. On her left, rendered more gigantic by the effect of the haze, the huge block of Queen Anne’s Mansions loomed like a mediæval fortress on the farther side of a mist-filled valley, from which slender poplars sprang. Everywhere points of flame ringed the gathering darkness--flames of trembling amber, specks of crimson and emerald where the hansoms were moving--and before her, at the end of the broad avenue, silver globes burned before the great vague pile of masonry which was Buckingham Palace. Cecily walked slowly, aware of the mysterious beauty of that brief moment when night touches departing day. There was a wisp of silver moon in the deep blue overhead, and near it one star trembled.