"Thomas, call the motor," I said, hurriedly. "Be quick! I'm going home, alone, and you must come with me. I've things for you to do. Mr. Jack Brokenshire will bring Mrs. Rossiter." On the way I explained my program to him through the window. I had been called suddenly to New York. There was a train from Boston to that city which would stop at Providence at two. I thought there was one from Newport to Providence about twelve-thirty, and it was now a quarter past eleven. If there was such a train I must take it; if there wasn't, the motor must run me up to Providence, for which there was still time. I should delay only long enough to pack a suit-case. For the use I was making of him and the chauffeur, as well as of the vehicle, I should be responsible to my hosts. Both the men being my tacitly sworn friends, there was no questioning of my authority. I fell back, therefore, into the depths of the limousine with the first sense of relief I had had since the day I accepted my position with Mrs. Rossiter. Something seemed to roll off me. I realized all at once that I had never, during the whole of the two years, been free from that necessity of picking my steps which one must have in walking on a tight-rope. Now it was delicious. I could have wished that the drive along Ochre Point Avenue had been thirty times as long. For Hugh I had no feeling of compunction. It was so blissful to be free. Cissie Boscobel, I knew, would make up to him for all I had failed to give, and would give more. Let me say at once that when, a few weeks later, the man Lady Janet Boscobel was engaged to had also been killed at the front, and her parents had begged Cissie to go home, Hugh was her escort on the journey. It was the beginning of an end which I think is in sight, of a healing which no one wishes so eagerly as I. For the last two years Cissie has been mothering Belgian children somewhere in the neighborhood of Poperinghe, and Hugh has been in the American Ambulance Corps before Verdun. That was Cissie's work, made easier, perhaps, by some recollection he retained of me. When he has a few days' leave--so Ethel Rossiter writes me--he spends it at Goldborough Castle or Strath-na-Cloid. I ran across Cissie when for a time I was helping in first-aid work not far behind the lines at Neuve Chapelle. I had been taking care of her brother Rowan--Lord Ovingdean, he calls himself now, hesitating to follow his brother as Lord Leatherhead, and using one of his father's other secondary titles--and she had come to see him. I hadn't supposed till then that we were such friends. We talked and talked and talked, and still would have gone on talking. I can understand what she sees in Hugh, though I could never feel it for him with her intensity. I hope her devotion will be rewarded soon, and I think it will.