‘It’s no good your looking about anywhere for consolation,’ she went on, wiping away her tears. ‘You are not made after the fashion of the modern lady, who can love anywhere and everywhere, so large is her heart; you are of that dreadfully old-world type of person, who, loving once, can never love again. Your love is killed in you; you are only half yourself now, and you must make the best of it. You must cut down your sentiments, smother your emotions, and live like St John in the wilderness, on ‘locusts and wild honey,’ by which you will for the future understand the rewards of Fame. And you will be in a desert all by yourself, fasting—fasting day and night—for the food of tenderness and love which you will never, never get—remember that! It’s rather a hard lot, you poor, weeping, weak little woman! But it’s marked out for you, and you will have to bear it!’ She smiled a pained, difficult smile, and she watched her own reflection smile back at her in the same sad way. Glancing at a time-piece on her dressing-table, she saw it was nearly two in the morning. Her husband had not returned. Twisting up her hair in a loose knot, she lay down on the bed and tried to sleep, but only succeeded in falling into an uneasy doze for about an hour. Ill and restless as she felt, however, she was up and dressed when her maid came to her in the morning, and before eleven o’clock she had left the house, with Spartan sitting beside her on the floor of the brougham which took her to the station, from whence she started for Broadstairs. She left no instructions with her household, beyond impressing once again upon Robson the urgent necessity of giving Lord Carlyon the letter she had written for him as soon as he returned. Robson promised implicit obedience, and watched the disappearance of the carriage containing his lady, her maid and her dog, with feelings of mingled curiosity and uneasiness. ‘Something’s in the wind, I’m pretty sure,’ he mused; ‘she has never gone away in this way, sudden-like, before. Very quiet, too, she looks, and very pale. She wouldn’t be the one to make a fuss about anything, but she’d feel all the more. I wonder if she knows?’ He stopped abruptly in the middle of the hall, evidently struck by this idea, and repeated the words to himself slowly and reflectively—‘I wonder if she knows?’ *CHAPTER VII*