'Mrs. Mason has lived on all these years in the house we passed just now. I have myself seen her several times peeping out of one of the windows. She has a thin, rather clever-looking face, and long grey curls. She was probably out just now, for she takes a drive every afternoon; but she never leaves her closed carriage, and, though she can walk quite well, they have to carry her out to it. She is intensely interested in weddings and funerals, and, on the very rare occasions when there is anything of the sort going on at Shagisham, her carriage is always drawn up close to the gate of the churchyard. She was there the day Mrs. Winfrith was buried. My father, who came down from London to be present, was very much shocked, and thought someone ought to have told the coachman to drive on; but of course no one liked to do it, and so Mrs. Mason saw the last of the woman who had been her rival.' CHAPTER XI 'Est-ce qu'une vie de femme se raconte? elle se sent, elle passe, elle apparait.'--SAINTE BEUVE. I That Sir George Downing should spend the last days of his sojourn in Dorset at Kingpole Farm, a seventeenth-century homestead, where, according to local tradition, Charles II. had spent a night in hiding during his hurried flight after the Battle of Worcester, had been Mrs. Robinson's wish and suggestion. He had welcomed the idea of leaving Monk's Eype with an eagerness which had pained her, though in her heart she was aware that she had thus devised a way out of what had become to them both a most difficult and false situation. Very soon after Downing's arrival at Monk's Eype Penelope had become acutely conscious of the mistake she had made in asking him to come there. After painful moments spent with him--moments often of embarrassed silence--she had divined, with beating heart and flushed cheek, why all seemed to go ill between them during this time of waiting and of suspense, which she had actually believed would prove a prolongation of the halcyon, dream-like days that had followed their first meeting. This beautiful, intelligent woman, with her strange half-knowledge of the realities of human life, and the less strange ignorances, which she kept closely hidden from those about her, had often received, especially in her 'Perdita' days, confidences which had inspired her with a deep distaste of those ignoble shifts and ruses which perforce so often surround a passion not in itself ignoble, or in any real sense impure. She had been glad to assure herself that in this case--that of her own relation to Downing--nothing of the kind need sully the beginnings of what she believed with all her heart would be a noble and lifelong love-story. Accordingly, there had been a tacit pact as to the reserve and restraint which should govern their relations the one to the other during the few weeks of Downing's stay in England.