It is time they should be here.  The carriage went to the station more than an hour ago.  I sit down in a window-seat that commands the park, and look along the drive by which the general went this morning.

Dear Roger!  I will practise calling him “Roger” when I am by myself, and then perhaps I may be able to address him by it when he comes home.  I will say, “How are you, Roger?”

I have fallen into a pleasant reverie, with my head leaned against the curtain, in which I see myself giving glib utterance to this formula, as I stand in a blue gown—­Roger likes me in blue—­and a blue cap—­I look older in a cap—­while he precipitates himself madly—­

My reverie breaks off.  Some one has entered, and is standing by me.  It is a footman, with a telegram on a salver.  Albeit I know the trivial causes for which people employ the telegraph-wires nowadays, I never can get over my primal deadly fear of those yellow envelopes, that seem emblems and messengers of battle, murder, and sudden death.  As I tear it open, a hundred horrible impossible possibilities flash across my brain.  Algy and Barbara have both been killed in a railway-accident, and have telegraphed to tell me so; the same fate has happened to Roger, and he has adopted the same course.

“Algernon Grey to Lady Tempest.

“Cannot come:  not allowed. He has turned nasty.”

The paper drops into my lap, as I draw a long breath of mingled relief and disappointment.  A whole long evening long night of this solitude before me! perhaps much more, for they do not even say that they will come to-morrow!  I must utter my disappointment to somebody, even if it is only the footman.

“They are not coming!” say I, plaintively; then, recollecting and explaining myself, “I mean, they need not send in dinner!  I will not have any!” I cannot stand another repast—­three times longer than the last too—­for one can abridge luncheon, seated in lorn dignity between the staring dead on the walls, and the obsequious living.

As soon as the man is fairly out of the room, I cry again.  Yes, though my hair is readjusted, though I spent more than a quarter of an hour in bathing my eyes, and restoring some semblance of white to their lids, though I had resolved—­and without much difficulty, too, hitherto—­to be dry-eyed for the rest of the evening.  What does it matter what color my eyelids are? what size my nose is? or how beblubbered my cheeks?  Not a soul will see them, except my maid, and I am naturally indifferent as to the effect I produce upon her.  I look at the clock on the mantel-piece.  It has stopped—­ornamental clocks mostly do—­but even this trivial circumstance adds to my affliction.  I instantly take out my pocket-handkerchief, and begin to cry again.  Then I look at my watch; a quarter-past seven only—­and my watch always gains!  Two hours and three-quarters before I can, with the smallest semblance of decency, go to bed.  Meanwhile I am hungry.  Though my husband has deserted me, though my brother and sister have failed me, my appetite has done neither.