“Mind, no; I am delighted to have you, and my mother, too. I was beginning to feel rather lonely, and had half decided on carrying baby off to Swanage. Isn’t he a fortunate boy to have two doating grandmothers?” She checked herself with a sudden sigh, remembering in what respect the richly-dowered infant was so much poorer than other babies. “Yes, darling,” she murmured, bending over the sleeping face, rosy amidst its lace and ribbons as it nestled against her arm. “Yes, there is plenty of love for you upon earth, my fatherless one; and, who knows, perhaps _his_ love is watching over you in heaven.” After this maternal interlude she remembered the obligations of hospitality. “Have you breakfasted, Theodore? You must have left Cheriton very early.” Theodore did not tell her how early, but he confessed to having taken only a cup of tea. “Then I will order some breakfast out here for you. It is such a perfect morning. Baby and I will stay with you while you take your breakfast.” She called the nurse, who was close by, and gave her orders, and presently the gipsy table was brought out, and a cosy breakfast was arranged upon the shining damask, and Theodore was having his coffee poured out for him by the loveliest hands he had ever seen, while the nurse paraded up and down the lawn with the newly-awakened baby. “I cannot understand my father taking an alarm of that kind,” Juanita said, presently, after a thoughtful silence. “It is so unlike him. As if any harm could come to me from tramps or gipsies, or even professional burglars, with half a dozen men-servants in the house, and all my jewels safe at the Bank. Theodore, does it mean anything?” she asked, suddenly. “Does it mean that my father has found out something about the murder?” He was silent, painfully embarrassed by this home question. To answer it would be to break faith with Lord Cheriton; to refuse to answer was in some manner to break his promise to Juanita. “I must ask you to let me leave that question unanswered for a few days,” he said. “Whatever discovery has been made it is your father’s discovery, and not mine. His lips alone can tell it to you.” “You know who murdered my husband?” “No. Juanita, I know nothing. The light we are following may be a false one.” He remembered how many lying confessions of crime had been made by lunacy since the history of crime began—how poor distraught creatures who would not have killed a worm had taken upon themselves the burden of notorious assassinations, and had put the police to the trouble of proving them self-accusing perjurers. Might not Mrs. Porter be such a one as these? “Ah! but you are following some new light—you are on the track of his murderer?” “I think we are. But you must be patient, Juanita. You must wait till your father may choose to speak. The business is out of my hands now, and has passed into his.” “And he is going to London to-day, you say—he is going upon that business?”