When she turned, smiling faintly, the light of the flickering candles fell upon her face, betraying a pallor which startled Dorothy from her reverie. She sprang from her chair, reproaching her selfishness. “You poor, tired, little mother,” she murmured penitently, with a hasty kiss. “How could I be so cruel as to keep you up after your journey! I’m a wretch, but I’m really going now. Good-night.” “Good-night,” said her mother, caressing the vagrant coils of the girl’s amber-coloured hair. “Don’t worry yourself; everything will come right if--if you listen to your own heart.” Dorothy’s answer was precluded by another kiss. “It’s so full of you that it can’t be bothered to think of any one else,” she declared plaintively, as she turned towards the door. Then she paused, fingering nervously a little heap of books which lay upon a table. “He--he isn’t so very old, you know,” she murmured softly before she made her escape. When she was alone Mrs. Vandeleur sank into the chair which her daughter had just quitted, nestling among the cushions and knitting her brows in thought. The clock on the mantelpiece had struck twelve before she rose, and then she paused for an instant in front of the looking-glass, gazing into it half timidly before she extinguished the candles. The face which she saw there was manifestly pretty, in spite of the trouble which lurked in the tired eyes, and when she turned away, a hovering smile was struggling with the depression at the corners of the delicate, mobile lips. IV When Sir Geoffrey returned to Riverside, three days later, after a brief sojourn in London, spent for the most part at the office of his solicitor in Lincoln’s Inn, he found Mrs. Vandeleur presiding over a solitary tea-table in a shady corner of the garden. A few chairs sociably disposed under the gnarled walnut-tree, and a corresponding number of empty tea-cups, suggested that her solitude had not been of long duration, and this impression was confirmed when Mrs. Vandeleur told her guest that if he had presented himself a short quarter of an hour earlier he would have been welcomed in a manner more worthy of his deserts. Sir Geoffrey drew one of the low basket chairs up to the table, protesting, as he accepted a cup of tea, that he could not have wished for better fortune. “This is very delightful,” he declared. “I don’t regret the tardiness of my train in the least. The other charming people are on the river, I suppose?” Mrs. Vandeleur nodded. “Yes, the Patersons have just taken up their quarters in that house-boat, which you must have noticed, near the lock, and my brother and Dorothy have gone with Jack Wilgress and his sisters to call upon them. You ought to have seen Daisy Wilgress; she is very pretty.” Sir Geoffrey smiled gravely, sipping his tea. “If she is prettier than your daughter, Miss Wilgress must be very dangerous. But I must see her with my own eyes before I believe that.”