Blanche quickened her footsteps as, in imagination, she saw herself in the witness-box speaking on behalf of Lionel Varick.

She argued with herself that, after all, it was just possible that he might be innocent!  If so, she would fight for him to the death, and that, however much it distressed and angered Mark Gifford that she should do so.

Absorbed in the dread and terrible thing he had come to tell her, she had not given him, the man who loved her, and whose wife she was to be, one thought since their solemn, rather shamefaced, embrace.  Yet now the knowledge that, however, much he disapproved, Mark would stand by her, gave her a wonderful feeling of security, of having left the open sea of life for a safe harbour—­and that in spite of the terrible hours, perhaps the terrible weeks and months, which now lay before her.

* * * * *

Turning the sharp angle which led to the gate giving admittance to the gardens of Wyndfell Hall, she suddenly met Helen Brabazon face to face, and for one wild moment Blanche thought that Helen knew.  The girl’s usually placid, comely face was disfigured.  It was plain that she had been crying bitterly.

“I’m going to the village,” she exclaimed; “I’ve got to go home to-day, and I must telegraph to my uncle.”

“I hope you haven’t had bad news?” said Blanche mechanically.

She was telling herself that it was quite, quite impossible that Helen knew anything—­but as Helen, who had begun crying again, shook her head, Blanche asked:  “Does Lionel know that you want to leave to-day?”

“Yes; I have told Mr. Varick,” and then all at once she exclaimed:  “Oh, Miss Farrow, I feel so utterly miserable!  Mr. Varick has just asked me to be his wife, and it has made me feel as if I had been so treacherous to Milly.  Yet I don’t think I did anything to make him like me?  Do you think I did?”

She looked appealingly at Blanche.

It was plain that what had happened had given her an extraordinary shock.  “I am sure, now,” she went on falteringly, “that Milly—­poor, poor Milly—­haunts this house.  I have felt, again and again, as if she were hovering about me.  I believe that what I saw in the hall, on that awful afternoon, was really her.  Yet Mr. Varick says that Milly would be very pleased if he and I were to marry each other.  Surely he is mistaken?”

“Yes,” said Blanche slowly, “I think he is.”

“I feel so miserable,” went on the girl, still speaking with a touch of excitement which in her was so very unusual.  “What happened this morning has spoiled what I thought was such a beautiful friendship!  And then I feel frightened—­horribly frightened”—­she went on in a low voice.

“What is it that frightens you, Helen?” asked Blanche.

These confidences seemed at once so futile, and yet also so sinister, knowing what she now knew.

“I’m afraid that Mr. Varick will ‘will’ me into thinking I care for him,” the girl confessed in a low voice.  “He says that he will never give up hope, and that, although he knows he isn’t worthy of me, he thinks that in time I shall care for him.  But I don’t want to care for him, Miss Farrow—­I’m sure that Milly is jealous of me; yet at Redsands, when she was dying, it made her happy that we were friends.”