"He will come back, though, I am sure he will," said Lady Nuneham with a nervous trill, and then a strange contraction passed over the Consul-General's face, and he rose to go.
"We'll not speak about that again, Janet," he said; but, full of the sweetest and bitterest emotion that comes to the human soul—the emotion of a mother when she thinks of the son that is lost to her—the old lady did not hear.
"I remember that his grandfather ... it was in the early days of the Civil War, I think ... he had done something against his General, I suppose——"
She had been speaking for some moments when Fatimah, who was standing behind, reached round to her ear and said—
"His lordship has gone, my lady," and then there was a sudden and deep silence.
The molten gold died out of the river and the sky, and in the luminous blue twilight the old lady got into bed.
"Fatimah," she said, "do you think Doctor would allow me to go up to the Citadel one day this week?"
"Why not, if the carriage was closed and the blinds down?"
"And, Fatimah?"
"What is it, O my heart?"