sharply together--"you must talk of something
else, and I will be quite quiet. Tell me where you have been--what you
have seen--the theatre--the opera--everything!"

She did her best, seeing already the anxious face of the nurse in the
window behind. And as she got up to go, she said, "I shall come again
very soon. And when you go to Yorkshire, I shall see you perhaps
every day."

He looked up in astonishment and delight, and she explained that at
Scarfedale Manor, her aunts' old house, she would be only two or three
miles from the high moorland vicarage whither he was soon to be moved.

"That will do more for me than doctors!" said Radowitz with decision.
Yet almost before she had reached the window opening on the balcony, his
pain, mental and physical, had clutched him again. He did not look up as
she waved farewell; and Sorell hurried her away.

Thenceforward she saw him almost every day, to Lady Langmoor's
astonishment. Sorell too, and his relation to Connie, puzzled her
greatly. Connie assured her with smiles that she was not in love with
the handsome young don, and never thought of flirting with him. "He was
mother's friend, Aunt Sophia," she would say, as though that settled the
matter entirely. But Lady Langmoor could not see that it settled it at
all. Mr. Sorell could not be much over thirty--the best time of all for
falling in love. And here was Connie going to pictures with him, and the
British Museum, and to visit the poor fellow in the nursing home. It was
true that the aunt could never detect the smallest sign of love-making
between them. And Connie was always putting forward that Mr. Sorell
taught her Greek. As if that kind of thing wasn't one of the best and
oldest gambits in the great game of matrimony! Lady Langmoor would have
felt it her solemn duty to snub the young man had it been at all
possible. But it was really not possible to snub any one possessed of
such a courteous self-forgetting dignity. And he came of a good
Anglo-Irish family too. Lady Langmoor had soon discovered that she knew
some of his relations, and placed him socially to a T. But, of course,
any notion of his marrying Connie, with her money, her rank, and her
good looks, would be simply ridiculous, so ridiculous that Lady Langmoor
soon ceased to think about it, accepted his visits, and began to like
him on her own account.

* * * * *

One evening towards the end of the first week in July, a han