Next day Lady Tilchester wrote and asked me to go to Harley. She had
heard I was alone, and would be so delighted to have me for a week,
she said.
I started two days afterwards. To see her would give me pleasure.
"How very white and thin you are looking, dear!" she said, as we sat
together in her sitting-room the first afternoon I arrived. "You are
not the same person as the very young girl who danced at the Yeomanry
ball in May. How old are you, Ambrosine?"
"I was twenty in October."
"Twenty years old! Only twenty years old, and with that sad face!
Nothing in life ought to make one sad at twenty. You look like a
piteous child. I could imagine Muriel, with a dead bird, or a set
of kittens to be drowned, looking as pathetic as you do."
"I know, I am ashamed of myself," I said,
