“Oh!” cried Carlotta, turning to the window, “how lovely the good sun is!  It is more like heaven than ever.  Do you know,” she added, mysteriously, “just before I woke it was all dark, and I had lost my angels and I was looking for them.”

I counselled her sagely to look for no more members of the Hierarchy en deshabille, but to content herself with the humbler denizens of this planet.  She pressed my hand.

“I’ll try to be contented, Seer Marcous, darling.”

She did her best, poor child, when I was by; but I heard that often she would sit by a little pile of garments and take them up one by one and cry her heart out—­so that though she quickly recovered, her cheeks remained wan and drawn, and pain lingered in her eyes.  The weather changed to fog and damp and she spent the days crouching by the fire, sometimes not stirring a muscle for an hour together.  Her favourite seat was the fender-stool in the drawing-room.  Her own boudoir downstairs, where she used to receive instruction from the excellent Miss Griggs, she scarcely entered.

She broke one of these fits suddenly and called me by her own pet version of my name.  I looked up from the writing-table where I was studying the Arabic grammar.

“Yes?”

“I have been thinking—­oh, thinking, thinking so long.  I’ve been thinking that you must love me very much.”

“Yes, Carlotta,” said I, with a half smile.  “I suppose I do.”

“As much as I loved my baby,” she said, seriously,

“I used to love you in a different way, perhaps,”

“And now?”

“Perhaps in the same sort of way, Carlotta.”

“I loved my baby because it was mine,” she remarked, looking at the flames through one hand’s delicate fingers.  “I wanted to do everything for him and didn’t want him to do anything for me.  I would have died for him.  It is so strange.  Yes, I think you must love me like that, Seer Marcous.  Why?”

“Because when I found you in the Embankment Gardens nearly two years ago you were about as helpless as your little baby,” I replied, somewhat disingenuously.

Carlotta gave me a quick glance.

“You thought me then what you call an infernal nuisance.  Oh, I know now.  I have grown wise.  But you were always good.  You looked good when you sat on the seat.  You were reading a dirty little book.”

“L’Histoire des Uscoques,” I murmured.  How far away it seemed.

There was a pause.  I regarded her for a moment or two.  She was sunk again in serious reflection.  I sighed—­at the general dismalness of life, I suppose—­and resumed my Arabic.

“Seer Marcous.”

“Yes?”

“Why didn’t you drive me away when I came back?”

I shut up the Arabic grammar and went and sat beside her on the fenderstool.

“My dear little girl—­what a question!  How could I drive you away from your own home?”