with her in silence.

"My dear daughter," he said, more simply and more sweetly than Lady
Bridget-Mary had ever heard him speak before, "I think you love this brave
gentleman sincerely?"

His daughter's large, beautifully-shaped hand closed strongly over the old
ivory fingers. The great brilliant dark grey eyes looked at him through a
sudden mist of tears, though she lifted her head and held it high. She
said in a low, clear voice:

"Father, you remember how my mother loved you? And Richard is as dear to
me as you were to her. I want words when it comes to speaking of so great
a thing as the love I feel for him. But it is my life.... I seem to
breathe with his breath, and think his thoughts, and speak with his voice,
since we found out our secret, and we are each other's for Time and for
Eternity." Then she added, with a lovely smile that had a touch of humour
in it: "And he will be quite content to take me with only my share of
mother's money."

"Tschah!" said the old father. "Nonsense! Of course, St. Barre will be
delighted to provide for you. Excuse me ... I must go."

St. Barre, in the Castleclare nursery, had set up another squeal.

Thenceforwards the course of true love might have been expected to run
smoothly for Lady Bridget-Mary and her gallant lover. But she had
reckoned, not without her host, but without her Grey Hussar. In love there
is always one who loves the more, and Lady Bridget-Mary, that fine,
enthusiastic, tempestuous creature, was far from realising that she was
less to her Richard than he was to her. The reason was not farther to seek
than a few doors off in London, when the Ladies Bawne occupied their
sombre old corner-house in Grosvenor Square. It was Lady Bridget-Mary's
dearest Lucy and bosom-friend, who had married that handsome,
grey-moustached martinet, Richard's Colonel. In Lady Lucy Hawting's
drawing-room Lord Castleclare's elder daughter had met Captain Mildare,
the hero of Futtehabad and Ahmed Khel. The Colonel's wife was a pretty,
delicate, graceful creature, some three years older than her black-browed
handsome friend, and much more learned, as, of course, befitted a married
woman, in the ways of the world. And Lady Lucy saw the budding of young
passion in the heart of her junior ... and it occurred to her that it
would furnish a very excellent excuse for the constant presence of Captain
Mildare, if ...! the sweetest and most limpid women have their turbid
depths, their muddy se