This shed a strange blank over it all to Herbert as well as to his sister. He did not seem to have the same tender and awestruck longing to be good. His recovery was not the same thing as it had been. He got better in a common way, as other men get better. He had come down from the soft eminence on which he had felt himself, and the change had a vulgarizing effect, lowering the level somehow of all his thoughts. But Herbert’s mind was not sufficiently visionary to feel this as a definite pain, as Reine did. He accepted it, sufficiently content, and perhaps easier on the lower level, and then to feel the springs of health stirring and bubbling after the long languor of deadly sickness is delight enough to dismiss all secondary emotions from the heart. Herbert was anxious to make another move, to appear before a new population, who would not be so sympathetic, so conscious that he had just escaped the jaws of death. “They are all a little disappointed that I did not die,” he said. “The village people don’t like it--they have been cheated out of their sensation. I should like to come back in a year or so, when I am quite strong, and show myself; but in the meantime let’s move on. If Everard stays, we shall be quite jolly enough by ourselves, we three. We shan’t want any other society. I am ready whenever you please.” As for Madame de Mirfleur, however, she was quite indisposed for this move. She protested on Herbert’s behalf, but was silenced by the physician; she protested on her own account that it was quite impossible she could go further off into those wilds further and further from her home, but was stopped by Reine, who begged her mamma not to think of that, since François and she had so often had the charge of Herbert. “I am sure you will be glad to get back to M. de Mirfleur and the children,” Reine said with an ironical cordiality which she might have spared, as her mother never divined what she meant. “Yes,” Madame de Mirfleur answered quite seriously, “that is true, chérie. Of course I shall be glad to get home where they all want me so much; though M. de Mirfleur, to whom I am sorry to see you never do justice, has been very good and has not complained. Still the children are very young, and it is natural I should be anxious to get home. But see what happened last time when I went away,” said the mother, not displeased perhaps, much as she lamented its consequences, to have this proof of her own importance handy. “I should never forgive myself if it occurred again.”