He reclined on a long chair, supported by pillows cunningly set for him by the hands of Leduc, and took his ease and indulged his day-dreams in Lord Ostermore's garden. He sat within the cool, shade of a privet , interlaced with flowering lilac and laburnum, and he looked out upon the long sweep of emerald lawn and the little patch of water where the water-lilies their ivory to the morning sun.  
He looked thinner, paler and more than was his habit, which is not wonderful, considering that he had been four weeks abed while his wound was mending. He was dressed, again by the hands of the incomparable Leduc, in a deshabille of some artistry. A dark-blue dressing-gown of flowered satin fell open at the waist; disclosing sky-blue breeches and pearl-colored stockings, elegant shoes of Spanish leather with red heels and diamond . His hair had been dressed with as great care as though he were attending a levee, and Leduc had insisted upon placing a small round patch under his left eye, that it might—said Leduc—impart to a that looked over-wan from his long .
 
He reclined there, and, as I have said, was almost happy.
 
The creature of sunshine that was himself at heart, had broken through the heavy clouds that had been obscuring him. An oppressive burden was lifted from his mind and conscience. That sword-thrust through the back a month ago had been guided, he opined, by the hand of a befriending ; for although he had, as you see, survived it, it had none the less solved for him that hateful problem he could never have solved for himself, that problem whose solution,—no matter which alternative he had adopted—must have brought him afterwards.
 
As it was, during the weeks that he had lain helpless, his life attached to him by but the merest thread, the chance of betraying Lord Ostermore was gone, nor—the circumstances being such as they were—could Sir Richard Everard blame him that he had let it pass.
 
Thus he knew peace; knew it as only those know it who have sustained unrest and can appreciate relief from it.
 
Nature had made him a voluptuary, and reclining there in an ease which the born of his long illness rendered the more delicious, the summer air that came to him with a most sweet attar from the flowering rose-garden, he realized that with all its cares life may be sweet to live in youth and in the month of June.
 
He sighed, and smiled at the water-lilies; nor was his happiness and the essence of his material ease. This was his third morning out of doors, and on each of the two mornings that were gone Hortensia had borne him company, coming with the charitable intent of lightening his by reading to him, but remaining to talk instead.
 
The most perfect had prevailed between them; a which Mr. Caryll had been careful not to by any return to such speeches as those which had originally offended but which seemed now mercifully forgotten.
 
He was awaiting her, and his heightened for him the glory of the morning, increased the meed of happiness that was his. But there was more besides. Leduc, who stood slightly behind him, , busy about a little table on which were books and cordials, flowers and comfits, a pipe and a tobacco-jar, had just informed him for the first time that during the more dangerous period of his illness Mistress Winthrop had watched by his bedside for many hours together upon many occasions, and once—on the day after he had been wounded, and while his fever was at its height—Leduc, entering suddenly and quietly, had surprised her in tears.
 
All this was most sweet news to Mr. Caryll. He found that between himself and his half-brother there lay an even deeper debt than he had at first supposed, and already acknowledged. In the delicious contemplation of Hortensia in tears beside him stricken all but to the point of death, he forgot entirely his erstwhile that being nameless he had no name to offer her. In imagination he up the scene. It made, he found, a very pretty picture. He would smoke upon it.
 
“Leduc, if you were to fill me a pipe of Spanish—”
 
“Monsieur has smoked one pipe already,” Leduc reminded him.
 
“You are inconsequent, Leduc. It is a sign of advancing age. Repress it. The pipe!” And he impatient fingers.
 
“Monsieur is forgetting that the doctor—”
 
“The devil take the doctor,” said Mr. Caryll with finality.
 
“Parfaitement!” answered the smooth Leduc. “Over the bridge we laugh at the saint. Now that we are cured, the devil take the doctor by all means.”
 
A of laughter came to applaud Leduc's excursion into . The arbor had another, narrower entrance, on the left. Hortensia had approached this, all unheard on the soft turf, and stood there now, a heavenly in white flimsy garments, head slightly a-tilt, eyes mocking, lips laughing, a heavy curl of her dark hair falling into the hollow where white neck sprang from whiter shoulder.
 
“You make too rapid a recovery, sir,” said she.
 
“It comes of learning how well I have been nursed,” he answered, making shift to rise, and he laughed inwardly to see the red flush of confusion spread over the milk-white skin, the reproachful her eyes let loose upon Leduc.
 
She came forward swiftly to check his rising; but he was already on his feet, proud of his return to strength, vain to display it. “Nay,” she reproved him. “If you are so headstrong, I shall leave you.”
 
“If you do, ma'am. I here, as I am, I hope, a gentleman, that I shall go home to-day, and on foot.”
 
“You would kill yourself,” she told him.
 
“I might kill myself for less, and yet be .”
 
She looked her despair of him. “What must I do to make you reasonable?”
 
“Set me the example by being reasonable yourself, and let there be no more of this wild talk of leaving me the very moment you are come. Leduc, a chair for Mistress Winthrop!” he commanded, as though chairs in a garden nook. But Leduc, the , had himself.
 
She laughed at his grand air, and, herself, drew forward the stool that had been Leduc's, and sat down. Satisfied, Mr. Caryll made her a bow, and seated himself sideways on his long chair, so that he faced her. She begged that he would dispose himself more comfortably; but he scorned the very notion.
 
“Unaided I walked here from the house,” he informed her with a boastful air. “I had need to begin to feel my feet again. You are me here, and to an is bad; it keeps him an invalid. Now I am an invalid no longer.”
 
“But the doctor—” she began.
 
“The doctor, ma'am, is disposed of already,” he assured her. “Very definitely disposed of. Ask Leduc. He will tell you.”
 
“Not a doubt of that,” she answered. “Leduc talks too much.”
 
“You have a spite against him for the information he gave me on the score of how and by whom I was nursed. So have I. Because he did not tell me before, and because when he told me he would not tell me enough. He has no eyes, this Leduc. He is a , who only sees the half of what happens, and only remembers the half of what he has seen.”
 
“I am sure of it,” said she.
 
He looked surprised an instant. Then he laughed. “I am glad that we agree.”
 
“But you have yet to learn the cause. Had this Leduc used his eyes or his ears to better purpose, he had been able to tell you something of the extent to which I am in your debt.”
 
“Ah?” said he, mystified. Then: “The news will be none the less welcome from your lips, ma'am,” said he. “Is it that you are interested in the ravings of , and welcomed the opportunity of observing them at first hand? I hope I engagingly, if so be that I did . Would it, perchance, be of a lady that I talked in my fevered wanderings?—of a lady pale as a lenten rose, with soft brown eyes, and lips that—”
 
“Your guesses are all wild,” she checked him. “My debt is of a more real kind. It concerns my—my reputation.”
 
“Fan me, ye winds!” he ejaculated.
 
“Those fine ladies and gentlemen of the town had made my name a by-word,” she explained in a low, tense voice, her lowered. “My foolishness in running off with my Lord Rotherby—that I might at all cost escape the tyranny of my Lady Ostermore” (Mr. Caryll's eyelids suddenly at that explanation)—“had made me a and a jest and an object for . You remember, yourself, sir, the and oglings, the starings and simperings in the park that day when you made your first attempt to champion my cause, inducing the Lady Mary Deller to come and speak to me.”
 
“Nay, nay—think of these things no more. will sting; 'tis in their nature. I admit 'tis very at the time; but it soon wears off if the flesh they have stung be healthy. So think no more on't.”
 
“But you do not know what follows. Her ladyship insisted that I should drive with her a week after your hurt, when the doctor first proclaimed you out of danger, and while the town was still all with the affair. No doubt her ladyship thought to put a fresh and greater upon me; you would not be present to blunt the edge of the insult of those creatures' glances. She carried me to Vauxhall, where a fuller scope might be given to the pursuit of my shame and . Instead, what think you happened?”
 
“Her ladyship, I trust, was disappointed.”
 
“The word is too poor to describe her condition. She broke a fan, beat her black boy and dismissed a footman, that she might some of the spleen it moved in her. Never was such respect, never such shown to any woman as was shown to me that evening. We were all but mobbed by the very people who had earlier slighted me.
 
“'Twas all so mysterious that I must seek the explanation of it. And I had it, at length, from his Grace of Wharton, who was at my side for most of the time we walked in the gardens. I asked him to what was this change owing. And he told me, sir.”
 
She looked at him as though no more need be said. But his brows were knit. “He told you, ma'am?” he questioned. “He told you what?”
 
“What you had done at White's. How to all present and to my Lord Rotherby's own face you had related the true story of what befell at Maidstone—how I had gone , an innocent, foolish maid, to be married to a , whom, like the silly child I was, I thought I loved; how that villain, taking advantage of my and ignorance, intended to hoodwink me with a mock-marriage.
 
“That was the story that was on every lip; it had gone round the town like fire; and it says much for the town that what between that and the business of the , my Lord Rotherby was receiving on every hand the he deserves, while for me there was once more—and with heavy interest for the from it—the respect which my indiscretion had , and which would have continued to be denied me but for your noble championing of my cause.
 
“That, sir, is the extent to which. I am in your debt. Do you think it small? It is so great that I have no words in which to attempt to express my thanks.”
 
Mr. Caryll looked at her a moment with eyes that were very bright. Then he broke into a soft laugh that had a note of slyness.
 
“In my time,” said he, “I have seen many attempts to change an topic. Some have been artful; others artless; others clumsy. But this, I think, is the clumsiest of them all. Mistress Winthrop, 'tis not in you.”
 
She looked puzzled, by his mood.
 
“Mistress Winthrop,” he resumed, with an............