Lord Walderhurst made a slight movement backward.

“I—­I should not know how,” he said, and then felt angry at himself.  He desired to take the thing in his arms.  He desired to feel its warmth.  He absolutely realised that if he had been alone with it, he should have laid aside his eyeglass and touched its cheek with his lips.

Two days afterwards he was sitting by his wife’s pillow, watching her shut lids, when he saw them quiver and slowly move until they were wide open.  Her eyes looked very large in her colourless, more sharply chiselled face.  They saw him and him only, as light came gradually into them.  They did not move, but rested on him.  He bent forward, almost afraid to stir.

He spoke to her as he had spoken before.

“Emily!” very low, “Emily!”

Her voice was only a fluttering breath, but she answered.

“It—­was—­you!” she said.

Chapter Twenty four

Such individuals as had not already thought it expedient to gradually loosen and drop the links of their acquaintance with Captain Alec Osborn did not find, on his return to his duties in India, that the leave of absence spent in England among his relatives had improved him.  He was plainly consuming enormous quantities of brandy, and was steadily going, physically and mentally, to seed.  He had put on flesh, and even his always dubious good looks were rapidly deserting him.  The heavy young jowl looked less young and more pronounced, and he bore about an evil countenance.

“Disappointment may have played the devil with him,” it was said by an elderly observer; “but he has played the devil with himself.  He was a wrong’un to begin with.”

When Hester’s people flocked to see her and hear her stories of exalted life in England, they greeted her with exclamations of dismay.  If Osborn had lost his looks, she also had lost hers.  She was yellow and haggard, and her eyes looked over-grown.  She had not improved in the matter of temper, and answered all effusive questions with a dry, bitter little smile.  The baby she had brought back was a puny, ugly, and tiny girl.  Hester’s dry, little smile when she exhibited her to her relations was not pretty.

“She saved herself disappointment by being a girl,” she remarked.  “At all events, she knows from the outset that no one can rob her of the chance of being the Marquis of Walderhurst.”

It was rumoured that ugly things went on in the Osborn bungalow.  It was known that scenes occurred between the husband and wife which were not of the order admitted as among the methods of polite society.  One evening Mrs. Osborn walked slowly down the Mall dressed in her best gown and hat, and bearing on her cheek a broad, purpling mark.  When asked questions, she merely smiled and made no answer, which was extremely awkward for the well-meaning inquirer.

The questioner was the wife of the colonel of the regiment, and when the lady related the incident to her husband in the evening, he drew in his breath sharply and summed the situation up in a few words.