She could have loved the twins dearly had they let her, and day by day, in the absence of the mother, she had been accustomed to nurse, she had even positively enjoyed 'petting' Mrs.Gaddesden, holding her wool for her, seeing to her hot-water bottles, and her breakfast in bed.
Pamela in love with Arthur Chicksands! And she remembered that a faint idea of it had once crossed her mind, only to be entirely dismissed and forgotten.
'But I ought to have seen--I ought to have known! Am I really a vampire ?' And she remembered how she, in her first youth, had suffered from the dominance and the accomplishment of older women; women who gave a girl no chance, who must have all the admiration, and all the opportunities, who would coolly and cruelly snatch a girl's lover from her.
'And that's how I've appeared to Pamela!' thought Elizabeth between laughing and crying.

'Yet all I did was to talk about ash for aeroplanes! Oh, you poor child--you poor child!' She seemed to feel Pamela's pain in her own heart--she who had had love and lost it.
'Am I just an odious, clever woman ?' She sat down and hated herself.
All the passing vanity that had been stirred in her by Sir Henry's compliments, all the natural pleasure she had taken in the success of her great adventure as a business woman, in the ease with which she, the Squire's paid secretary, had lately begun to lead the patriotic effort of an English county--how petty, how despicable even, it seemed, in presence of a boy who had given his all!--even beside a girl in love! And the Squire--'Was I hard to him too ?' The night came down.

All the strange or beautiful shapes in the library wavered and flickered under the firelight--the glorious Nike--the Eros--the noble sketch of the boy in his cricketing dress....
* * * * * The following morning came a telegram from Aubrey Mannering to Mrs.
Gaddesden.

Elizabeth had done her best to propitiate her but she remained cold and thorny, and when the telegram came she was pleased that the news came to her first, and--tragic as it was--that Elizabeth had to ask her for it! 'Terrible wounds.

Fear no hope.