This communication made a little breach between Bee and her mother and planted a thorn in Mrs. Kingsward’s breast. She had been getting on so well; the quiet (which meant the riot of the seven nursery children and all their troublesome ways) had been doing her so much good, and the absence of every care save that Johnny should not take cold, and Lucy eat enough dinner--that it was hard upon her thus to be brought back in a moment to another and a more pressing kind of care. However, after an hour or two’s estrangement from Bee, which ended in a fuller expansion than ever of sympathy between them--and a morning or two in which Mrs. Kingsward remembered as soon as she awoke that it would be her duty to tell her husband and break up the pleasant peace and harmony of the household--the sweetness of that _dolce far niente_ swept over her again and obliterated or at least blurred the outline of all such troublous thoughts. Colonel Kingsward sent a hasty telegram to say that he was going on somewhere else for another ten days’ shooting, and that, though she exclaimed at first with a countenance of dismay, “Oh, children, papa is not coming home for another week!” in reality gave a pang of relief to her mind. Gliding into her being, she scarcely knew how, was an inclination to take every day as it came without thinking of to-morrow--which was perfectly natural, no doubt, and yet was an unconscious realisation of the fact, which as yet she had never put into words, nor had suggested to her, that those gentle days were numbered. Her husband’s delay was in one way like a reprieve to her. She had, like all simple natures, a vague faith in accident, in something that might turn up--“perhaps the world may end to-night”--something at least might happen in another ten days to make it unnecessary for her to disturb the existing state of affairs and throw new trouble into the house. She did not waver at first as to her duty, though nothing in the world could be more painful; and Bee did not say a word to change her mother’s resolution. Bee had always been aware that as soon as it was known the matter must come to another crisis--and the scorn with which she regarded the idea of doing anything clandestine prevented her even from asking that her secret should be kept. It was not in her mind but in her mother’s that those faint doubtings at last arose--those half entertained thoughts that a letter or two could do no harm; that the correspondence would drop of itself when it was seen between the two that there was no hope in it; and that almost anything would be better than a storm of domestic dispeace and the open rebellion in which Mrs. Kingsward felt with a shudder Bee would place herself. How are you to break the will of a girl who will not be convinced, who says it is not your, but her affair?