When the Countess Lavinia left the library she went instantly and stealthily to the foot of the great stairway.

“Honoria!” she called in a hushed yet insistent voice. “Honoria!”

A slight figure in a light dress and mob cap appeared on the first wide landing.

“Come down,” said the Countess, glancing furtively behind her, and the maid noiselessly and carefully descended.

“What has happened, my lady?” she asked, peering into her mistress’s face, her own sharp fair countenance alert and eager; she had an air of secret malice and quick, unpleasant eyes.

The Countess clutched her arm.

“Come into the garden, not another moment under his roof, not another moment!” she whispered feverishly.

The maid expressed no astonishment, nor did her mistress seem to expect it; they had the manner of adepts in quick confidences and whispered exchanges of dangerous talk.

With a light step that seemed that of taught secrecy, Honoria preceded her mistress down the passage, and softly opened the door.

The two came out on to the wide steps where the moonlight lay still and pure.

“Shut the door,” whispered the Countess, and the maid obeyed, asking under her breath:

“What are you going to do, my lady?”

The Countess with a wild gesture tore her purple gown wider open at the throat.

“I don’t know—I will leave the place, I cannot endure it—why should I endure it?”

“Hush! Hush!” whispered the maid.

Her mistress stifled a little hysterical sound and again caught her companion’s arm.

Swift and noiseless they descended the steps and passed under the shadows of the high rustling trees; then Honoria stopped, holding back her mistress.

“You can’t run away now,” she said with an air of resolution, “whatever has happened, my lady; why, you have neither mantle, nor hat, nor money—and who is to shelter you till the coach goes, here in a strange place?”

The Countess pressed her open hand to her forehead.

“I will not stay to be scorned—I will not,” she cried frantically. “I am going back to my father if I have to walk; he can but murder me, and that were to be preferred to life with these!”

And she tried to press on through the low sweet shrubs.

“You are in a frenzy,” said Honoria quietly, not loosening her hold. “Return home! it is madness, my lady. Consider a little.”

The Countess shuddered.

“What is there to consider? I am sick with hate!”

“What did they do?” questioned Honoria shrewdly. “They did not fight?”

“Would to God they had!” answered Rose’s wife furiously. “But I am of too little account to bring gentlemen’s swords to the crossing! ‘What do we marry you for if not for our convenience?’ he said, and sent me from the room. And Marius turned his back on me!”

She flung herself on the maid’s bosom, clinging round her neck, choking with bitter weeping in her throat. In the darkness cast by the peaceful trees, alone in the free air with her one confidante, she let herself go utterly, the nameless passion that possessed her broke forth, tearing speech to tatters.

“How I have loved him! Bear witness how I have hated him, Honoria! Every time he looked at me ’twas as if he saw a smirch on his escutcheon. He never troubled to speak to me of any matter of his world, taking it for granted I could not understand; my people were not genteel; I should be waiting in my father’s shop. But there was always Marius. Did he not follow me in Paris? Did he not wait beneath my window? Did he not colour when I spoke to him, as if I had been a princess, Honoria? Did he not?”

She freed herself from the maid’s support, and leant heavily against the straight trunk behind her.

“My God! My God!” she cried violently. “He spoke to me after his brother’s fashion, and I was scorned of both of them!”

Honoria looked at her curiously.

“I should not have thought it of Mr. Marius,” she said; “but these great gentlemen are strange. But they are men,” she added quickly, “and you are a woman, my lady. He was in love with you once, and might be again, I’ll swear to it!”

The Countess Lavinia was silent, wearily struggling with tumultuous sobs that hurt her breast. She clasped her hands over her heart and looked on the ground.

The maid leant forward. A stray ray of moonlight pierced the gently waving foliage, and showed her delicate, sharp face and the curling locks of bright gold hair that escaped from under her white muslin cap.

“Think a little, my lady, of the position you have and the power it gives you over both of them. What good would you do by running away?”

“Disgrace him, at least,” came heavily from the Countess Lavinia.

“And yourself more, my lady. What would they say—‘who was she but a perked-up Miss that lost her head?’ Great ladies do not run away. And how would Mr. Hilton receive you?”

“But for him I had never married this man,” broke out the Countess desperately. “No, I vow it! But did he not threaten to shut me up in Bedlam? You heard him tell me my grandmother had died mad, and so his daughter should if she were not Lady Lyndwood!”

“And ye were resigned,” returned the maid quickly.

“I was cowed, but I would have married Marius. Yes, last spring I would have married him, so great a fool was I, and let the money go. The money! What use is it to me? What pleasure have I in seeing it go to pay his debts, to procure luxuries for his mother, to keep up the estate he mocks me with, to minister to his extravagance? My money, my father’s money! And my amusement must be to see it spent on foreign Delilahs and gipsy actresses who laugh at me!”

She stopped, gasping for breath. The maid eyed her keenly, and offered no reply.

“Let us walk on!” cried the Countess. “I cannot stand still.”

She moved forward through the trees, and Honoria followed.

For a while there was no speech between them, and the snapping of branches and crushing back of leaves was distinctly heard. The Countess pushed back the damp dark curls from her brow and burst into words again.

“Am I not a good woman?” she exclaimed. “Am I not as fair and as witty as that cousin of his? Why should they turn their backs on me? I wot that among the women he has courted were some not so well born as I.”

“But he did not marry one of them,” returned Honoria in her quiet, insinuating voice, “and that is your strength, my lady. You do not hold him by the bonds of fancy, or the bonds of liking, or bonds of fashion, but by the bonds of the law, and that is the most lasting thing, my lady.”

They had come out on to a fair lawn that sloped to a lake, and the sky showed vast above them. Through the dark trees ran the constant tripping murmur of the wind, and the long grass bent towards the water when the breeze strengthened. The moon was almost overhead and floated in a faint golden haze.

The Countess turned and looked back at the house, impassive and fine in the veiled silver light.

“Could we not have bought such a place?” she said. “Ay, and finer, Honoria! Could we not have paid for them with pieces across the counter in our tradesmen’s way, sooner than have made this bargain of scorn for hate, sooner than have given our all for this unendurable position?”

The misty moonshine fell over her close dark hair and slender figure. Her face was in shadow, and she supported herself by resting one frail white hand ag............