"He gives us all a turn, mother," said Miss Cora Brooke. "He even gave a
turn yesterday to poor Emily Fox-Seton. He's rather nice."

There was a great deal of laughter at lunch after their return. Miss
Cora Brooke was quite brilliant in her gay little sallies. But though
she was more talkative than Lady Agatha, she did not look more
brilliant.

The letter from Curzon Street had not made the beauty shed tears. Her
face had fallen when it had been handed to her on her return, and she
had taken it upstairs to her room with rather a flagging step. But when
she came down to lunch she walked with the movement of a nymph. Her
lovely little face wore a sort of tremulous radiance. She laughed like a
child at every amusing thing that was said. She might have been ten
years old instead of twenty-two, her colour, her eyes, her spirits
seemed of a freshness so infantine.

She was leaning back in her chair laughing enchantingly at one of Miss
Brooke's sparkling remarks when Lord Walderhurst, who sat next to her,
said suddenly, glancing round the table:

"But where is Miss Fox-Seton?"

It was perhaps a significant fact that up to this moment nobody had
observed her absence. It was Lady Maria who replied.

"I am almost ashamed to answer," she said. "As I have said before, Emily
Fox-Seton has become the lodestar of my existence. I cannot live without
her. She has walked over to Maundell to make sure that we do not have a