“Shall we go back, Gerald?” his wife murmured, her heart beating with mingled fear and hope. “I think I could do it,” answered Roxhall. “At least, if it is fair to take her offer. One must not come over this young woman because she is generous. Yes; I think with great pinching we could do it.” “I would live on bread and water all my life to go back!” said his wife with a force he had never known in her. “I ought never to have sold it,” said Roxhall, his thoughts reverting to his cousin’s wiles. He took up the letter and read it again. “She would like to give it to us,” he said a second time. “How very odd that such an unutterable cad as that man Massarene was should have such a daughter. I think I had better go to London to-night and see our lawyers. I will get the old place back somehow, if it’s fair to her.” “Yes, one must be fair to her,” said his wife, and added with remorse, “And to think how rude I have always been to her! I turned my back on them all three at the late State concert, just a week before the man was assassinated.” Roxhall laughed and got up to go and look at the railway time-table, and she rose too, and to avoid her many acquaintances went to walk by herself in the woods and commune with her own heart, and her longing to return to Vale Royal, and her wistful memories of her little dead child, Lillias. She was a gentle, brave, tender-hearted woman who had suffered much and concealed her sufferings courageously from both her husband and her world. At the end of that month Katherine Massarene had ceased for a time her painful self-imposed task and gone down to Bournemouth, where she had taken a house for the autumn and winter; a villa in a pine-wood which looked on to the sea. It was a pretty place but to her mother it seemed a poor nutshell after the spaciousness and splendor of Harrenden House and Vale Royal. The diminished establishment, the comparatively empty stables, the loss of Richemont and his satellites, were at once a relief and an offence to her. “One would think poor William had been sold up and we was livin’ on my savings,” she said in indignation. “My dear mother, you could not keep up this place under three thousand a year,” said her daughter. “And what’s that to us as had millions?” asked her mother. Katherine thought of the primary plank hut at Kerosene City, but she saw that her mother was in no mood to remember those primitive times.