On the whole, and despite his close and devoted attendance on his patient, Chudleigh Wilmot saw a great deal of Lady Muriel, and an infinite number of topics were discussed between them. Each day brought more extended, more appreciative comprehension of her guest to the by no means dull intellect of Lady Muriel; and each day quickened her womanly perception and kindled her already keen and ready jealousy. When many days had gone by, and Lady Muriel would no longer have dreamed of denying to herself how much she admired Wilmot,--how utterly different he was from any other man whom she had ever known; how much more interesting, how much more engrossing, a man to be looked up to and respected; a man to suffice to all a woman's need of reverence and deference,--she would still have been far from acknowledging that she loved him; but her acknowledgment or her denial would have made no difference in the fact. She did love him, in a lofty and reserved kind of way, in which no slur upon her honour, according to the world's code, which takes cognisance only of the letter of the law and ignores its spirit, was implied; but with all her heart she loved him. So now the situation was this. Chudleigh Wilmot loved one woman within the walls of the old mansion of Kilsyth; and another woman, their inmate, loved him. Would she--the other, the older, the more experienced woman--discover his secret, and overwhelm him with its disgrace? Time alone could tell that--time, of which there was not much to run; for Wilmot had been a fortnight at Kilsyth before he could give its master the joyful intelligence that the fever had relaxed its grip of his child, and--barring the always present danger in scarlet-fever of relapse, or what is technically called "dregs"--Madeleine was safe. Mabel Wilmot had written to her husband occasionally during the fortnight which had witnessed the rise and the crisis of Miss Kilsyth's illness. In her letters, which were few and sparing of details, she never alluded to the cause of her husband's unprecedented absence; Wilmot did not notice the omission. She gave him few details concerning herself; Wilmot did not observe their paucity. The glamour was over him; the enchanted land held him. "I am not feeling much better," said Mabel in one of her letters; "but I daresay--indeed I have no doubt--the weather is against me; Whittaker thinks so too. I enclose his report. There is nothing new here, or of importance." Chudleigh Wilmot accepted his wife's account of the state of things at home, and replied to her letters in his usual strain. He had failed to notice that she never alluded to Miss Kilsyth; or he would hardly have dealt with so much emphasis, or at such length, on the details of a case to which the recipient of his letters manifested such complete indifference.