e, now, and I really must have proved a clever pupil, for I
assure you that they tell me I have made some pretty things." As she
spoke she held up the seam she ran, and Bulstrode, who himself
confessed to not knowing a needle by sight, was forced to peer over the
seam and endeavor to find her tiny stitches. He exclaimed:

"Three months! You must have been terribly dull!"

"No."

"You are known," he said, "throughout the countryside--not that I've
been making inquiries, but in spite of myself I have heard--as a
stranger, presumably a Frenchwoman, a widow who will probably buy The
Dials."

"Oh, I shall never buy the place," she assured him, and then abruptly:
"Had you been free to speak of me, what would you have told Westboro'?"

He waited a second, then answered her lightly, but with a feeling which
she did not mistake: "I should have asked him to come and see you run
up that seam."

"He would not have come."

Remembering very clearly how determined Westboro's decision had been,
he did not affirm to the lady his belief that Westboro' would in
reality have flown to her.

At the door, later, she bade him good-bye and appeared to gather her
courage together, and, with a lapse into a simplicity so entire that
she seemed only Frances Denby and to possess no more of title or
distinction than any lovely woman, she said to him:

"Mr. Bulstrode, please don't leave the castle."

"Oh, I couldn't sit opposite my friend at dinner, I couldn't meet his
eyes now, my dear child."

The Duchess touched his arm. "It's sweet of you to call me so. You
are really as young as I am, and certainly I feel an age beyond you.
Please stay."

The pleasure which his visits had been to her had brought something of
an animation and interest to her cold face. Dressed in a dark and
simple gown, her fur stole about her neck, she had this afternoon
followed him out of the house into the garden and walked slowly along
by his side towards the gate.

"Of all the people in the world one would choose you, I think, to be
the friend of..." She caught herself up. "I mean to say, can't you
forget those stupid little ideas of honor and friendship and all that?"
She put it beautifully. "I, of course, will give up seeing you," she
renounced, "but it will be a world of comfort just to feel that you are
there."

As he did not at once succumb to her blandishments, she asked point
blank:

"Promise me to stop on."

"I at least won't go withou