“That’s right,” Miss Vanderpoel said.  “Keep them closed.  I must not talk to you until you are stronger.  Lie still and try not to think.  The doctor says you are getting on very well.  I will come and see you again.”

As the soft sweep of her dress reached the door he managed to open his eyes.

“Thank you, Miss Vanderpoel,” he said.  “Thank you, ma’am.”  And as his eyelids closed again he murmured in luxurious peace:  “Well, if that’s her—­she can have me—­and welcome!”

*****

She came to see him again each day—­sometimes in a linen frock and garden hat, sometimes in her soft tints and lace and flowers before or after her drive in the afternoon, and two or three times in the evening, with lovely shoulders and wonderfully trailing draperies—­looking like the women he had caught far-off glimpses of on the rare occasion of his having indulged himself in the highest and most remotely placed seat in the gallery at the opera, which inconvenience he had borne not through any ardent desire to hear the music, but because he wanted to see the show and get “a look-in” at the Four Hundred.  He believed very implicitly in his Four Hundred, and privately—­though perhaps almost unconsciously—­cherished the distinction his share of them conferred upon him, as fondly as the English young man of his rudimentary type cherishes his dukes and duchesses.  The English young man may revel in his coroneted beauties in photograph shops, the young American dwells fondly on flattering, or very unflattering, reproductions of his multi-millionaires’ wives and daughters in the voluminous illustrated sheets of his Sunday paper, without which life would be a wretched and savourless thing.

Selden had never seen Miss Vanderpoel in his Sunday paper, and here he was lying in a room in the same house with her.  And she coming in to see him and talk to him as if he was one of the Four Hundred himself!  The comfort and luxury with which he found himself surrounded sank into insignificance when compared with such unearthly luck as this.  Lady Anstruthers came in to see him also, and she several times brought with her a queer little lame fellow, who was spoken of as “Master Ughtred.”  “Master” was supposed by G. Selden to be a sort of title conferred upon the small sons of baronets and the like.  The children he knew in New York and elsewhere answered to the names of Bob, or Jimmy, or Bill.  No parallel to “Master” had been in vogue among them.

Lady Anstruthers was not like her sister.  She was a little thing, and both she and Master Ughtred seemed fond of talking of New York.  She had not been home for years, and the youngster had never seen it at all.  He had some queer ideas about America, and seemed never to have seen anything but Stornham and the village.  G. Selden liked him, and was vaguely sorry for a little chap to whom a description of the festivities attendant upon the Fourth of July and a Presidential election seemed like stories from the Arabian Nights.