"When will she be back?" I asked, leaning from the carriage to speak.
The servant girl, rather a dirty one and slipshod, did not know. Not at all, she thought. Mrs. Howard had left for good.
"But does Mrs. Howard not live here? Is not this her house?"
"No, ma'am. She lodged here for a little while; that was all."
I don't know why the information struck on my mind as curious, but it did so. Why should she have been there one day, as it were, and be gone the next? It might be all right, however, and I fanciful. Mrs. Penn had said—Mrs. Howard herself had said—she was going to visit her daughter in Brussels. Only I had thought she lived in that house at Marden.
That evening I found I had to dine alone. Mr. Chandos was rather poorly, not able to eat any dinner, Hickens said. How solitary it was to me, nobody knows.
Afterwards, when I was sitting at the window in the dusk, he came downstairs. He had been in the west wing nearly all day. Opening his desk, he took out a bundle of letters: which appeared to be what he had come for.
"You must feel lonely, Miss Hereford?"
"A little, sir."
"That 'sir!'" he said, with a smile. "I am sorry not to be able to be down here with you. When I get better, we will have our pleasant times again."