"Mrs Rolph has taken a furnished house in London for three months, and they're going to it next week, and as Perkins' man says, it do seem hard, after getting on for two years without delivering regular joints at the house for them to be off again." "Well," said Mason, Glynne's maid, contemptuously, "I wish the lady joy of him. A low, common, racing and betting man. I wouldn't marry him if he was made of gold." "Right, Mrs Mason," said Morris. "I don't know what Nature was thinking about to make him an officer. No disrespect meant to those in the stables, but to my mind, if Captain Rolph--and I saw a deal of him when he was here--had found his--his--" "Focus," suggested cook, and there was a roar in which the butler joined, by way of smoothing matters over with his fellow-servant. "I meant to say level, cook. He would have been a helper, or the driver of a cab. He was never fit for our young lady." The servants' hall tattle proved to be quite correct, for within a week The Warren was vacant again, Rolph being back at barracks, and Mrs Rolph and her niece at a little house in one of the streets near Lowndes Square, busily occupied in preparing the lady's _trousseau_, for the marriage was to take place within a month. It was not long after that the news reached The Firs, and Lucy became very thoughtful, and ended by feeling glad. She hardly knew why, but she was pleased at the idea of Captain Rolph being married and out of the way. And now, by no means for the first time, a great longing came over Lucy to see Glynne Day again. She knew that the family had been for a year and a half in Italy, and only heard by accident that they had returned to Brackley, so quietly was everything arranged. Then, as the days glided by, and she heard no more news, the longing to see Glynne again intensified. She felt the tears come into her eyes and trickle down her cheeks as she thought of the terrible catastrophe--never even alluded to at The Firs-- a horror which had saved her from being Rolph's wife, but at what a cost! "Poor Moray!" she sighed more than once in her solitary communings. "Poor Glynne! and they might have been by now happy husband and wife. It is too horrible--too dreadful. How could Fate be so cruel!" Lucy shivered at times as she mentally called up the careworn, beautiful, white face of her old friend, who had never been seen outside the walls of the house, so far as she could learn, since her return. And at last, trembling the while, as if her act were a sin, instead of true womanly love and charity, she wrote a simple little letter to Glynne, asking to see her, for that she loved her very dearly, and that the past was nothing to them, and ought not to separate two who had always been dear friends.