Bessie enjoyed it immensely, and felt herself growing stronger and better in the brightness and freshness of this beautiful home which was one day to be Grey’s.

On the wall, beside Blind Robin’s, there was a picture of Grey, taken in Europe when he was fourteen, and just before the great sorrow came upon him and robbed his face of a little of the assurance and boyish eagerness which the artist had depicted upon the canvas.  But it was like him still—­like him, as he was now, in his young manhood, when to do good to others, to make somebody happy every day, was the rule of his life.  And Bessie’s eyes were often fixed upon it, as, after lunch was over they still sat in the breakfast-room, because of the sunshine which came in so brightly at the windows.  And while they sat there the elder women talked of Grey and what he would probably do, now that his travels in Europe were ended.

“He ought to marry and settle down.  Is there any hope of his doing so?” Miss Betsey said, and Lucy replied: 

“I think so, yes, I am quite sure of it, if everything goes well, as I think it will.”

Bessie was sitting with her back partly turned to the ladies, who did not see the crimson spots which covered her face for a moment and then left it deathly pale, as she heard that Grey Jerrold was to be married.  For an instant everything around her turned black, and when she came to herself she felt that she could not breathe in that room with Grey’s picture on the wall, and his eyes looking at her as they had looked that day, in Rome, when he had said to her words she would almost give half her life to hear again.  Bessie was no dissembler.  She could not sit there in her pain and make no sign, and, turning to her aunt, she said: 

“Please, auntie, let Jennie take me into the air, I am sick and faint; I—­”

She could not say anything more lest she should break down entirely; and, glancing significantly at each other, the two ladies called Jennie, and bade her take her young mistress into the garden.

“Go to the rose-arbor.  It is warmer there,” Miss Lucy said; but only Jennie heard, for Bessie was too conscious of the blow which had fallen so suddenly upon her, to heed what was passing around her.

Grey was going to be married; her Gray, whom she now knew that she loved as she had never loved Neil McPherson even in the first days of her engagement, when he was all the world to her.  Her Grey, who certainly had loved her once, or he would never have said to her what he did.  Her Grey, who had been so kind to her on the ship and looked the love he did not speak.  Why had he changed so soon?  Was it some love of his boyhood before he saw her, and had it again sprung into being, now that he had returned to its object?  And oh, how dreary the world looked to the young girl with the certainty that Grey was lost to her forever.  She did not notice the fanciful summer-house into which Jennie wheeled her; did not notice anything, or think of anything except her desolation and a desire to be alone, that she might cry just as she had never cried before.