"Nobody else round about Yardley except these two knows," she kept saying to herself with a bound of relief, "and for these I don't care.

The doctor is Jane's slave, and the captain is evidently wise enough not to uncover skeletons locked up in his own closet." These things settled in her mind, my lady gave herself up to whatever enjoyment, compatible with her rapidly fading mourning, the simple surroundings afforded, taking her cue from the conditions that confronted her and ordering her conduct accordingly and along these lines: Archie was her adopted nephew, the son of an old friend of Jane's, and one whom she would love dearly, as, in fact, she would anybody else whom Jane had brought up; she herself was a gracious widow of large means recovering from a great sorrow; one who had given up the delights of foreign courts to spend some time among her dear people who had loved her as a child.

Here for a time would she bring up and educate her daughter.
"To be once more at home, and in dear old Warehold, too!" she had said with upraised Madonna-like eyes and clasped hands to a group of women who were hanging on every word that dropped from her pretty lips.

"Do you know what that is to me?
There is hardly a day I have not longed for it.

Pray, forgive me if I do not come to see you as often as I would, but I really hate to be an hour outside of the four walls of my precious home.".