CHAPTER VII.
The daily reading proceeded as usual after Barker's departure, but neither Margaret nor Claudius mentioned the subject of the voyage.
Margaret was friendly, and sometimes seemed on the point of relapsing into her old manner, but she always checked herself.

What the precise change was it would be hard to say.

Claudius knew it was very easy to feel the difference, but impossible to define it.

As the days passed, he knew also that his life had ceased to be his own; and, with the chivalrous wholeness of purpose that was his nature, he took his soul and laid it at her feet, for better for worse, to do with as she would.
But he knew the hour was not come yet wherein he should speak; and so he served her in silence, content to feel the tree of life growing within him, which should one day overshadow them both with its sheltering branches.

His service was none the less whole and devoted because it had not yet been accepted.
One evening, nearly a week after they had been left to themselves, Claudius was sitting over his solitary dinner in the casino restaurant when a note was brought to him, a large square envelope of rough paper, and he knew the handwriting.