Lady Gernon was still on her knees, holding the boy, who, forgetting his fear, was playing with her watch-chain, when slowly, and with courtly grace, conversing loudly the while, Sir Murray led Ada Norton into the garden, when the dread and undefined feelings in the latter's heart were chased away, and a happy light beamed in her eye as she caught sight of the group before her; but there was an ill-concealed, angry glance directed at his wife by Sir Murray, and another at the child--an angry, jealous, envious look, but it was gone in an instant, and, stooping down, he too sought to take the child's hand, but only for it to shrink from him hastily. "Oh, Ada!" exclaimed Lady Gernon, with swimming eyes, as she laid her hand upon her cousin's arm; and in those two words there seemed sufficient to disarm every doubt and suspicion--to break off the points of the thorns that had been ready to enter into her soul; and Ada, as much at rest as now seemed Lady Gernon, turned to her smilingly, ready to listen to her praises of the child's beauty, and her prayers that they might be as of old. "I have been so lonely abroad, Ada," said Lady Gernon, sadly. "You will renew the old days, will you not?" Ada Norton paused for a moment before she answered, looking steadfastly in her cousin's face, to see there now a calm, sad serenity, that she could hardly understand, when, the words being repeated almost imploringly, the reply was, "Yes." "I am at your service, Lady Gernon," said Sir Murray at that moment, when, once more, embracing the child, Lady Gernon kissed her cousin with the same old tenderness as of yore, turning the next moment to offer her hand, with a sad, quiet smile, to Philip Norton, who led her to the carriage; and then it all seemed to him to have been a dream, while the sound of the carriage-wheels, fast subsiding into a murmur, were but a part of the imaginings of his troubled brain. But the next instant he had started back to the reality, for his wife was gazing anxiously in his troubled face, when, as his eyes met hers, his old quiet smile came back, and, catching the boy in his arms, he made the little fellow shout with glee as he galloped him round the garden, to return with flushed face and tumbled hair to his watching wife. "Philip?" she said, looking up at him inquiringly. "My love," he said, tenderly. "You have something to say to me, have you not?" "No," he said, quietly; "unless it is--better friends than enemies." Mrs Norton said no more; but there was a pang at her heart, for she felt that her husband was keeping something from her. Book 1, Chapter XIII. BROODING.