morning in absorbed confabulation among the greenhouses. She was
startled to find, when the colloquy ended, that it was nearly
luncheon-time, and she half expected, as she hurried back to the
house, to see her husband coming out to meet her. But she found
no one in the court but an under-gardener raking the gravel, and
the hall, when she entered it, was so silent that she guessed
Boyne to be still at work behind the closed door of the library.

Not wishing to disturb him, she turned into the drawing-room, and
there, at her writing-table, lost herself in renewed calculations
of the outlay to which the morning's conference had committed
her. The knowledge that she could permit herself such follies
had not yet lost its novelty; and somehow, in contrast to the
vague apprehensions of the previous days, it now seemed an
element of her recovered security, of the sense that, as Ned had
said, things in general had never been "righter."

She was still luxuriating in a lavish play of figures when the
parlor-maid, from the threshold, roused her with a dubiously
worded inquiry as to the expediency of serving luncheon. It was
one of their jokes that Trimmle announced luncheon as if she were
divulging a state secret, and Mary, intent upon her papers,
merely murmured an absent-minded assent.

She felt Trimmle wavering expressively on the threshold as if in
rebuke of such offhand acquiescence; then her retreating steps
sounded down the passage, and Mary, pushing away her papers,
crossed the hall, and went to the library door. It was still
closed, and she wavered in her turn, disliking to disturb her
husband, yet anxious that he should not exceed his normal measure