There was nothing the matter with her, Cousin Mary said, but the shock had been too much for her. A few days' rest and quiet, the doctor thought, might bring her round. 'You have seen the Master?' she asked Lucy eagerly when she came into the room. Lucy noticed that the voice, like the face, had changed, and grown feeble and old. 'Yes; I have seen the Master. He is so much better to-day. He is sitting up by the window. He is quite himself.' She didn't say anything about that fishing excursion of his, nor how tired he felt now the day's work was done. 'He is really better?' She asked this with a strange eagerness, and laid her thin hand on Lucy's. 'Yes, dear, really better. He will soon be quite well. It is you who are the invalid now. You must make haste and get well, too.' 'Thank God!' said the feeble voice, and the thin hand relaxed its hold, and she fell back on the pillow. 'Someone told me he was wandering,' she said--'that he did not know anyone. But perhaps I am mistaken. It may be in me. I may have dreamed it.' 'Yes, dear,' Lucy said reassuringly, 'it is in you. You have certainly dreamed it.' She left the old woman quite happy, but tears were dropping from her own eyes as she went slowly down the stairs of the lodge. She was not quite sure in this tender casuistry if she was not giving the Master's wife the sentence of death. CHAPTER XVI. THE OLD, OLD STORY. What on earth possessed Lucy to go out into the lane again the next morning at that ridiculously early hour, before seven o'clock, she could never tell. She was not anxious about the Master. She had left him in good hands, sitting beside the window babbling about the lilac-bushes in the old garden. Perhaps it was because it was such a lovely May morning that Lucy went out into the lane; it was a shame to stay indoors a minute longer. A change had come over the scene since yesterday. The clouds had all passed away like magic, and the sun was shining, and the sky was blue above, and the earth was green beneath, and, oh, how the birds were singing! There was no excuse for Lucy being in bed. Most of the girls had been up working hours ago, and some had not been in bed since daybreak. She didn't expect to meet anyone in the lane; she only went out, and looked round, quite by the way, and--and she saw Wyatt Edgell coming to her, up between the green hedgerows, where the hawthorn was in bloom, and beneath the blue sky, where a lark--where a dozen larks were singing, and she had never seen so delightful a picture before in her life. Like the storm of yesterday, all traces of that midnight debauch had passed away. His face ought to have been pale and soddened, and his eyes dull and heavy, with great bags beneath them, but they were not the least changed. The fine intellectual beauty of the face was finer than ever, and the mere physical beauty, which no girl could look upon untouched, was seen to its best advantage on this sweet May morning.