“My dear, you don't look fit to be out!” said Mrs. Haswell, taking her hand, and looking at her in a concerned way. “Are you sure you're all right?”

“Oh, yes! Just one of my wretched heads. Better now. Don't say anything about it: Bernard worries so about me!”

This was seen to be true. The Squire had come up to them, and was anxiously scanning his wife's face. “My dear, is this wise of you? I hoped you'd have a sleep.”

“I did have a sleep, Bernard, and it did me so much good that I couldn't bear to stay away from Adelaide's party. Now, don't fuss, darling, please!”

He shook his head, but said no more. Mrs. Haswell could not think it wonderful that he should be worried. Rosamund Ainstable, though more than ten years his junior, was a woman who, without having any organic disease, had never enjoyed good health. Her constitution was delicate; any exertion out of the way was apt to prostrate her; and she was the victim of sick headaches whose cause had consistently baffled her many medical advisers. She had ceased to try to discover it, saying, with a rueful laugh, that having worked her way expensively up Harley Street, she had neither the means nor the stamina to work her way down it. In the popular phrase, she lived on her nerves, which were ill-adapted to bear the strain. She had endured two world wars, dying a thousand vicarious deaths in the first, when she had known that every telegram delivered to her must contain the news that her husband had been killed in action; and losing her only child in the second. Her friends had prophesied that she would not recover from this blow; but she had recovered, exerting herself to support and to comfort the Squire, whose pride and hope were buried somewhere in the North African Desert. It might have been expected that he and she, with their heir dead, would have ceased to struggle to maintain an estate impoverished by the financial demands of one war, and brought almost to penury by those of a second, but, as the Squire's legal adviser, Thaddeus Drybeck, loftily pointed out to his acquaintance, Blood Told, and the Squire continued to plan and contrive as though he believed he would be succeeded by the son he had adored, and not by a nephew whom he scarcely knew, and did not much like.