Cecily looked up puzzled. He came round and stood by the table on which lay the two gifts received by her that day. Very deliberately he took up one of Mrs. Robinson's soft lead-pencils, and then wrote across a torn piece of drawing-paper, 'This is from a lover Who will love you for ever,' and laid it down so that it covered the pearls. 'You see,' he said, 'this is not, as was the other gift to-day, friendship's offering. But, still, the words I have written there are meant quite as sincerely. These pearls belonged to my mother. They were given to her by my father on the first anniversary of their wedding-day, and I know how happy it would have made her--have made them both--to think that you would wear them.' He spoke quickly, and yet after the first moment, with great gravity. As Cecily made no answer, he added: 'You will not refuse to take them from me?' II The old nurse had watched Penelope drive off alone that afternoon with deep misgiving and fear, for she was quite sure that her mistress was bound for Kingpole Farm. Motey had soon become aware that Mrs. Robinson received no letters from Downing, and this, to a mind sharpened by jealousy and semi-maternal instinct, only the more indicated the closeness and the thorough understanding between them, and showed, or so the maid believed, that all their plans as to the future were already arranged. Again and again she had been on the point of attacking her mistress, of asking Penelope to confirm or to deny her suspicions, and many a night, while lying awake listening through the closed door to Mrs. Robinson's restless movements, always aware when her nursling was not asleep, Mrs. Mote would make up long homely phrases in which to formulate her appeal. But when daylight came, when she found herself face to face with Penelope, her courage ebbed away, and she became afraid--for herself. What if anything said by her provoked a sudden separation from her mistress? More than once in the last ten years Motey and Mrs. Robinson had come to moments of sudden warfare, when the younger woman's affection for her old nurse had been sorely tried, and yet on those occasions, as Mrs. Mote was only too well aware, no feeling even approaching that which now bound Penelope to Sir George Downing had been in question. Sometimes the old woman told herself that she was a fool, and that her terrors were vain terrors, for the actual proofs of what she feared was about to happen were few. Again and again, during Mrs. Robinson's brief absences from the villa, Motey had sought to find--what? She hardly knew.