extend the term during which he could regard himself as absent on special service.  How thankful he had been when first the tidings reached him that he was to come home at the expense of the Crown, and without diminution of his official income!  He had now been in England for five months, with a per diem allowance, with his very cabs paid for him, and he was discontented, sullen, and with nothing to comfort him but his official grievance, because he could not be allowed to extend his period of special service more than two months beyond the time at which those special services were in truth ended!  There had been a change of Ministry in the last month, and he had thought that a Conservative Secretary of State would have been kinder to him.  ’The Duke says I can stay three months with leave of absence and have half my pay stopped.  I wonder whether it ever enters into his august mind that even a Colonial Governor must eat and drink.’  It was thus he expressed his great grievance to his wife.  ‘The Duke,’ however, had been as inexorable as his predecessor, and Sir Rowley, with his large family, was too wise to remain to the detriment of his pocket.  In the meantime the clerks in the office, who had groaned in spirit over the ignorance displayed in his evidence before the committee, were whispering among themselves that he ought not to be sent back to his seat of government at all.

Lady Rowley also was disappointed and unhappy.  She had expected so much pleasure from her visit to her daughter, and she had received so little!  Emily’s condition was very sad, but in her heart of hearts perhaps she groaned more bitterly over all that Nora had lost, than she did over the real sorrows of her elder child.  To have had the cup at her lip, and then not to have tasted it!  And she had the solace of no communion in this sorrow.  She had accepted Hugh Stanbury as her son-in-law, and not for worlds would she now say a word against him to any one.  She had already taken him to her heart, and she loved him.  But to have had it almost within her grasp to have had a lord, the owner of Monkhams, for her son-in-law!  Poor Lady Rowley!

Sophie and Lucy, too, were returning to their distant and dull banishment without any realisation of their probable but unexpressed ambition.  They made no complaint, but yet it was hard on them that their sister’s misfortune should have prevented them from going almost to a single dance.  Poor Sophie and poor Lucy!  They must go, and we shall hear no more about them.  It was thought well that Nora should not go down with them to Southampton.  What good would her going do?  ’God bless you, my darling,’ said the mother, as she held her child in her arms.

‘Good-bye, dear mamma.’

’Give my best love to Hugh, and tell him that I pray him with my last word to be good to you.’  Even then she was thinking of Lord Peterborough, but the memory of what might have been was buried deep in her mind.