“Perhaps I’m so fond of her that it’s making me downright silly,” she said to her mother; “but it seems as if I can’t help it.  I feel as if I’d like to know everything she does, and go over the ground to make sure of it before she goes anywhere.  I’m so proud of her, mother; I’m just as proud as if I was some connection of the family, instead of just her maid.  It’ll be such a splendid thing if she keeps well and everything goes as it should.  Even people like us can see what it means to a gentleman that can go back nine hundred years.  If I was Lady Maria Bayne, I’d be here and never leave her.  I tell you nothing could drive me from her.”

“You are well taken care of,” Hester had said.  “That girl is devoted to you.  In her lady’s maid’s way she’d fight for your life.”

“I think she is as faithful to me as Ameerah is to you,” Emily answered.  “I feel sure Ameerah would fight for you.”

Ameerah’s devotion in these days took the form of a deep-seated hatred of the woman whom she regarded as her mistress’s enemy.

“It is an evil thing that she should take this place,” she said.  “She is an old woman.  What right hath she to think she may bear a son.  Ill luck will come of it.  She deserves any ill fortune which may befall her.”

“Sometimes,” Lady Walderhurst once said to Osborn, “I feel as if Ameerah disliked me.  She looks at me in such a curious, stealthy way.”

“She is admiring you,” was his answer.  “She thinks you are something a little supernatural, because you are so tall and have such a fresh colour.”

There was in the park at Palstrey Manor a large ornamental pool of water, deep and dark and beautiful because of the age and hugeness of the trees which closed around it, and the water plants which encircled and floated upon it.  White and yellow flags and brown velvet rushes grew thick about its edge, and water-lilies opened and shut upon its surface.  An avenue of wonderful limes led down to a flight of mossy steps, by which in times gone by people had descended to the boat which rocked idly in the soft green gloom.  There was an island on it, on which roses had been planted and left to run wild; early in the year daffodils and other spring flowers burst up through the grass and waved scented heads.  Lady Walderhurst had discovered the place during her honeymoon, and had loved it fondly ever since.  The avenue leading to it was her favourite walk; a certain seat under a tree on the island her favourite resting-place.

“It is so still there,” she had said to the Osborns.  “No one ever goes there but myself.  When I have crossed the little old bridge and sit down among the greenness with my book or work, I feel as if there was no world at all.  There is no sound but the rustle of the leaves and the splash of the moor-hens who come to swim about.  They don’t seem to be afraid of me, neither do the thrushes and robins.  They know I shall only sit still and watch them.  Sometimes they come quite near.”