"Astonished, Jimmy?" smiled the girl, still outwardly unperturbed, as Aliette, hardly restraining a sly chuckle of amusement, climbed up beside the driver. "I certainly didn't expect----" "To find me here." Imperturbability gave place to diffidence. "I didn't know _you_ were coming down till an hour ago. Perhaps, if I had known, I shouldn't have come." "That's a jolly remark to one's fiancé." "I'm not your fiancée." They were within two miles of Daffadillies before Jimmy ventured his next remark. "Then you haven't changed your mind, dear?" "Certainly not. And, Jimmy--please behave yourself." The man--his slight caress eluded--fell into a sulky silence. "Devilish awkward position," he decided--thought of his father's baronetcy, and of the social responsibilities entailed on a family solicitor, weighing heavily on his Philistine mind--"women _are_ the devil!" He felt that he had been trapped; first, into foregathering with Aliette, a situation he had done his best to avoid since the scandal; secondly, into a scene with Mollie; and thirdly, into yet another discussion with that very resolute old lady, Julia Cavendish, about her son's matrimonial troubles. Nevertheless, the drive soothed him; and by the time they made the stone lodge and the eagle-crowned pillars of the great house, the prospect--scene or no scene--of twenty-four hours in Mollie's company outweighed all other considerations. Moreover, it seemed impossible to associate the foursquare magnificence and tree-girt terraces of Daffadillies with any form of scandal! "And how _is_ Mrs. Cavendish?" he remembered to ask Aliette, as they alighted. "Bucking up, one hears." "She's ever so much better. She's in the garden to-day." 2 It is one of the tragedies of a long illness that those who live in daily contact with it fail to perceive the changes wrought in their loved one. James Wilberforce, as he made his way through the long hall and out of the French windows, down the stone steps on to the south lawns, was horrified at the first sight of his client. Only two days since he had read of her, somewhere or other, as "well on her way to recovery." Nearing the shawled figure in the long chair under the cedar-tree, he knew the full inaccuracy of that bulletin. Julia Cavendish had shrunk to a merest vestige of the woman he remembered. The hand she extended to him seemed so frail that he hardly dared clasp it. The gray hair was nearly white; the sunken cheeks hectic; the bloodless lips tremulous. Only in her eyes shone the old dominance.