ble
temper, and that night he came home covered with blood, looking--awful!
It was the night when I was taken ill."

"Well no more tragedies," he insisted. "I have come up to remind you
that we have guests here. When are you coming down to see them?"

She laughed like a child.

"You say 'we' just as though you were really my husband," she declared.

"You must not tell any one else of your fancy," he warned her.

She acquiesced at once.

"Oh, I quite understand," she assured him. "I shall be very, very
careful. And, Everard, you have such clever guests, not at all the sort
of people my Everard would have had here, and I have been out of the
world for so long, that I am afraid I sha'n't be able to talk to them.
Nurse Alice is tremendously impressed. I am sure I should be terrified
to sit at the end of the table, and Caroline will hate not being hostess
any longer. Let me come down at tea-time and after dinner, and slip into
things gradually. You can easily say that I am still an invalid, though
of course I'm not at all."

"You shall do exactly as you choose," he promised, as he took his leave.

So when the shooting party tramped into the hall that afternoon, a
little weary, but flushed with exercise and the pleasure of the day's
sport, they found, seated in a corner of the room, behind the
great round table upon which tea was set out, a rather pale but
extraordinarily childlike and fascinating woman, with large, sweet eyes
which seemed to be begging for their protection and sympathy as she rose
hesitatingly to her feet. Dominey was by her side in a moment, and his
first few words of introduction brought every one around her. She said
very little, but what she said was delightfully natural and gracious.

"It has been so kind of you," she said to Caroline, "to help my husband
entertain his guests. I am very much better, but I have been ill for so
long that I have forgotten a great many things, and I should be a very
poor hostess. But I want to make tea for you, please, and I want you all
to tell me how many pheasants you have shot."

Terniloff seated himself on the settee by her side.

"I am going to help you in this complicated task," he declared. "I am
sure those sugar tongs are too heavy for you to wield alone."

She laughed at him gaily.

"But I am not really delicate at all," she assured him. "I have had a
very bad illness, but I am quite strong again."

"Then I will find some other excuse for sitting h