not close.  Above all, to Warwickshire he would not go—­Dunstan’s Wolde must see him no more, and Dunstanwolde House in town he would gradually visit less and less often, until his kinsman ceased to expect the old familiarity, believing his many duties kept him away.  In his happiness he would have but little time to miss him seriously, perhaps even to remember that his presence had been once so much less rare a thing.

“‘Son,’ he once loved to call me,” he thought, with a sharp pang.  “He is an old man, ’tis true, but Heaven may give him a son of his own.”

Even as the thought crossed his mind—­as a flame of lightning crosses a black sky—­he heard old Rowe begin to ring his peal, and soon—­or it seemed soon to him—­the first party of arrivals wound through the park, now and then its colours gleaming through an opening in the trees.  There were mounted and safely armed servitors riding in attendance to guard the big travelling-coach with its six strong, finely bred horses.  In this the Earl and his Countess sate, the lady a little pale, from the fatigue of her journey, perhaps; following them came another vehicle, substantial but less splendid than their own equipage, in it, my lady’s two Abigails and the gentleman of his lordship carrying the iron jewel-box secreted in a special hiding-place beneath the seat, for the baffling of highwaymen, if any such were bold enough to attack a party so well attended by sturdy strength and shining arms.  When she had stepped forth across the threshold of her town house, attended by subservient lacqueys bowing in line on either side, the Countess had faintly smiled, and when they had entered their coach and the door been closed upon them, she had turned this smile with a sweet archness upon her lord.

“I smile, my Lord,” she said, “to think what a great lady your goodness has made of me, and how in these days I ride forth, and how in the past, when I was but Clo Wildairs our old chariot lumbered like a house on wheels, and its leather hung in flaps, and the farm horses pulled it lurching from side to side, and old Bartlemy had grown too portly for his livery and cursed when it split as he rolled in his seat.”  And her laugh rang out as if it were a chime of bells, and her lord, laughing with her—­but for joy in her arch gayety—­adored her.

“If any had told the county then that I would one day ride forth like this,” says she, “from Dunstanwolde House to pay visit to a Duke at Camylott, who could have believed it?  I would not myself.  And ’tis you who have given me all, my dear lord,” laying her soft hand in his.  “You, Edward, and I am full of gratefulness.”

What wonder that he was a happy man, he who had hoped for so little and had found so much, since she did not think—­as a slighter woman might—­that her youth and beauty paid for and outweighed his richest gifts, but was heavenly kind and dutiful and tender, giving him of her brightest humours and prettiest playfulness and gentlest womanly thought, and receiving his offerings, not as her mere right, but as signals of his generousness and tender love for her.