The letter ended abruptly, as though the writer’s strength were exhausted.  Audrey read it through, then with indifference gave it back to Evelyn.  “It is true,—­what he says?” whispered the latter, crumpling the paper in her hand.

Audrey gazed up at her with wide, tearless eyes.  “Yes, it is true.  There was no need for you to use those words to me in the coach, that night,—­though even then I did not understand.  There is no reason why you should fear to touch me.”

Her head sank upon her arm.  In the parlor below the singing came to an end, but the harpsichord, lightly fingered, gave forth a haunting melody.  It was suited to the afternoon:  to the golden light, the drifting leaves, the murmurs of wind and wave, without the window:  to the shadows, the stillness, and the sorrow within the room.  Evelyn, turning slowly toward the kneeling figure, of a sudden saw it through a mist of tears.  Her clasped hands parted; she bent and touched the bowed head.  Audrey looked up, and her dark eyes made appeal.  Evelyn stooped lower yet; her tears fell upon Audrey’s brow; a moment, and the two, cast by life in the selfsame tragedy, were in each other’s arms.

“You know that I came from the mountains,” whispered Audrey.  “I am going back.  You must tell no one; in a little while I shall be forgotten.”

“To the mountains!” cried Evelyn.  “No one lives there.  You would die of cold and hunger.  No, no!  We are alike unhappy:  you shall stay with me here at Westover.”

[Illustration:  HER DARK EYES MADE APPEAL]

She rose from her knees, and Audrey rose with her.  They no longer clasped each other,—­that impulse was past,—­but their eyes met in sorrowful amity.  Audrey shook her head.  “That may not be,” she said simply.  “I must go away that we may not both be unhappy.”  She lifted her face to the cloud in the south, “I almost died last night.  When you drown, there is at first fear and struggling, but at last it is like dreaming, and there is a lightness....  When that came I thought, ’It is the air of the mountains,—­I am drawing near them.’ ...  Will you let me go now?  I will slip from the house through the fields into the woods, and none will know”—­

But Evelyn caught her by the wrist.  “You are beside yourself!  I would rouse the plantation; in an hour you would be found.  Stay with me!”

A knock at the door, and the Colonel’s secretary, a pale and grave young man, bowing on the threshold.  He was just come from the attic room, where he had failed to find the young woman who had been lodged there that morning.  The Colonel, supposing that by now she was recovered from her swoon and her fright of the night before, and having certain questions to put to her, desired her to descend to the parlor.  Hearing voices in Mistress Evelyn’s room—­

“Very well, Mr. Drew,” said the lady.  “You need not wait.  I will myself seek my father with—­with our guest.”