“I knew he would find you!” Rosalie answered quite faintly.  “I knew you would!” turning to Mount Dunstan, adoring him with all the meaning of her small paled face.

She would have been afraid of her memory of what she had said in the strange scene which had taken place before them a few hours ago, but almost before either of the two spoke she knew that a great gulf had been crossed in some one inevitable, though unforeseen, leap.  How it had been taken, when or where, did not in the least matter, when she clung to Betty and Betty clung to her.

After a few moments of moved and reverent waiting, the admirable Jennings stepped forward and addressed her in lowered voice.

“There’s been little sleep in the village this night, my lady,” he murmured earnestly.  “I promised they should have a sign, with your permission.  If the flag was run up—­they’re all looking out, and they’d know.”

“Run it up, Jennings,” Lady Anstruthers answered, “at once.”

When it ran up the staff on the tower and fluttered out in gay answering to the morning breeze, children in the village began to run about shouting, men and women appeared at cottage doors, and more than one cap was thrown up in the air.  But old Doby and Mrs. Welden, who had been waiting for hours, standing by Mrs. Welden’s gate, caught each other’s dry, trembling old hands and began to cry.

The Broadmorlands divorce scandal, having made conversation during a season quite forty years before Miss Vanderpoel appeared at Stornham Court, had been laid upon a lower shelf and buried beneath other stories long enough to be forgotten.  Only one individual had not forgotten it, and he was the Duke of Broadmorlands himself, in whose mind it remained hideously clear.  He had been a young man, honestly and much in love when it first revealed itself to him, and for a few months he had even thought it might end by being his death, notwithstanding that he was strong and in first-rate physical condition.  He had been a fine, hearty young man of clean and rather dignified life, though he was not understood to be brilliant of mind.  Privately he had ideals connected with his rank and name which he was not fluent enough clearly to express.  After he had realised that he should not die of the public humiliation and disgrace, which seemed to point him out as having been the kind of gullible fool it is scarcely possible to avoid laughing at—­or, so it seemed to him in his heart-seared frenzy—­he thought it not improbable that he should go mad.  He was harried so by memories of lovely little soft ways of Edith’s (his wife’s name was Edith), of the pretty sound of her laugh, and of her innocent, girlish habit of kneeling down by her bedside every night and morning to say her prayers.  This had so touched him that he had sometimes knelt down to say his, too, saying to her, with slight awkward boyishness, that a fellow who had a sort of angel for his wife ought to do his best to believe in the things she believed in.