But time is on my side, time and the Soudan--and
'The heathen in his blindness....' I will keep what is mine. I will keep
it!"

CHAPTER XXVII. THE AWAKENING

In her heart of hearts Hylda had not greatly welcomed the Duchess of
Snowdon to Hamley. There was no one whose friendship she prized more;
but she was passing through a phase of her life when she felt that
she was better apart, finding her own path by those intuitions and
perceptions which belonged to her own personal experience. She vaguely
felt, what all realise sooner or later, that we must live our dark hours
alone.

Yet the frank downright nature of the once beautiful, now faded,
Duchess, the humorous glimmer in the pale-blue eyes, the droll irony
and dry truth of her speech, appealed to Hylda, made her smile a warm
greeting when she would rather have been alone. For, a few days before,
she had begun a quest which had absorbed her, fascinated her. The miner,
finding his way across the gap of a reef to pick up the vein of quartz
at some distant and uncertain point, could not have been more lost
to the world than was the young wife searching for a family skeleton,
indefinitely embodied in her imagination by the name, James Fetherdon.

Pile after pile of papers and letters of the late Earl and his Countess
had passed through her hands from chaos to order. As she had read, hour
after hour, the diaries of the cold, blue-eyed woman, Sybil Eglington,
who had lived without love of either husband or son, as they, in turn,
lived without love of each other, she had been overwhelmed by the
revelation of a human heart, whose powers of expression were smothered
by a shy and awkward temperament. The late Countess's letters were the
unclothing of a heart which had never expanded to the eyes of those
whose love would have broken up a natural reserve, which became at last
a proud coldness, and gave her a reputation for lack of feeling that she
carried to her grave.

In the diaries which Hylda unearthed--the Countess had died
suddenly--was the muffled cry of a soul tortured through different
degrees of misunderstanding; from the vague pain of suffered
indifference, of being left out of her husband's calculations, to the
blank neglect narrowing her life down to a tiny stream of duty, which
was finally lost in the sands. She had died abroad, and alone, save for
her faithful maid, who, knowing the chasm that lay between her mistress
and her lord, had brought her letters