mistress of the house.

"_Vois-tu_, Virginie," the latter would say hopefully. "When I have a
little baby, I shall have done my duty as the wife of a great
English milord. Even Miss Catherine will no longer regard me as of no
importance."

And Virginie would reply with infinite satisfaction:

"Of a certainty, when madame has a little son, Ma'moiselle Catherine
will be returned to her place."

And now at last the great moment had arrived, and upstairs Catherine and
Virginie were in attendance--both ousted from what each considered her
own rightful place of authority by a slim, capable, and apparently quite
unconcerned piece of femininity equipped against rebellion in all the
starched panoply of a nurse's uniform, while downstairs Hugh stared
dumbly out at the frosted lawns, with their background of bare, brown
trees swaying to the wind from the north.

The door behind him opened suddenly. Hugh whirled round. He was a
tall man with a certain rather formal air of stateliness about him,
a suggestion of the _grand seigneur_, and the unwontedly impulsive
movement was significant of the strain under which he was labouring.

Catherine was standing on the threshold of the room with something in
her arms--something almost indistinguishable amid the downy, fleecy
froth of whiteness amid which it lay.

Hugh was conscious of a new and strange sensation deep down inside