ted a moment.

"Yes," he said, slowly, but in a changed voice, "Yes, I shall still be
there."

Whereupon, with perturbation, Mrs. Gaddesden at last remembered there
were other lions in the path. They had not said a single word--however
conventional--of Elizabeth. But she quickly consoled herself by the
reflection that he must have seen by now, poor fellow, how hopeless it
was; and that being so, what was there to be said against admitting him
to their circle, as a real friend of all the family--Philip's friend,
Elizabeth's, and her own?

That night Mrs. Gaddesden was awakened by her maid between twelve and
one. Mr. Gaddesden wanted a certain medicine that he thought was in his
mother's room. Mrs. Gaddesden threw on her dressing-gown and looked for
it anxiously in vain. Perhaps Elizabeth might remember where it was last
seen. She hurried to her. Elizabeth had a sitting-room and bedroom at
the end of the corridor, and Mrs. Gaddesden went into the sitting-room
first, as quietly as possible, so as not to startle her daughter.

She had hardly entered and closed the door behind her, guided by the
light of a still flickering fire, when a sound from the inner room
arrested her.

Elizabeth--Elizabeth in distress?

The mother stood rooted to the spot, in a sudden anguish.
Elizabeth--sobbing? Only once in her life had Mrs. Gaddesden heard that
sound before--the night that the news of Francis Merton's death reached
Martindale, and Elizabeth had wept, as her mother believed, more for
what her young husband might have been to her, than for what he had
been. Elizabeth's eyes filled readily with tears answering to pity or
high feeling; but this fierce stifled emotion--this abandonment of pain!

Mrs. Gaddesden stood trembling and motionless, the tears on her own
cheeks. Conjecture hurried through her mind. She seemed to be learning
her daughter, her gay and tender Elizabeth, afresh. At last she turned
and crept out of the room, noiselessly shutting the door. After
lingering a while in the passage, she knocked, with an uncertain hand,
and waited till Elizabeth came--Elizabeth, hardly visible in the
firelight, her brown hair falling like a veil round her face.

CHAPTER XIV

A few days later the Gaddesdens were in town, settled in a house in
Portman Square. Philip was increasingly ill, and moreover shrouded in a
bitterness of spirit which wrung his mother's heart. She suspected a new
cause for it in the fancy that he had lat