“Well, go to bed now, darling; and, Tita, if Maurice says anything to you—­anything——­”

“Cross—­I know!” puts in Tita.

“Promise me you will not answer him in anger, do promise me!  It makes me so unhappy,” says Margaret persuasively, kissing the girl, and pressing her in her arms.

“Oh! Does it?  I’m sorry,” says Tita, seeing the real distress on Margaret’s sweet face.  “There!  He may say what he likes to me, I shan’t answer him back.  Not a word!  A syllable!  I’ll be as good as gold!”

She kisses Margaret fondly, and leaves the room.

Outside, in the long corridor, the lamps are beginning to burn dimly.  It is already twelve o’clock.  Twelve strokes from the hall beneath fall upon Tita’s ear as she goes hurriedly towards her own room.  It is the midnight hour, the mystic hour, when ghosts do take their nightly rounds!

This is not a ghost, however, this tall young man, who, coming up by the central staircase, meets her now face to face.

“Tita!  Is it you?”

“Yes, yes,” says Tita, trying to hurry past him.

If Tom has come up from the smoking-room, of course the others will be coming too, and, on the whole, she is not as well got up as usual.  It is with a sort of contempt she treats the charming gown in which she is now clothed.  And yet she has hardly ever looked lovelier than now, with her eyes a little widened by her late grief, and her hair so sweetly disturbed, and her little slender form showing through the open folds of the long white gown that covers her.

“Don’t go.  Don’t!” says Tom Hescott; his tone is so full of poignant anguish that she stops short.  “Stay a moment.”  In his despair he has caught a fold of her gown.  To do him fair justice, he honestly believes that she hates her husband, and that she is thoroughly unhappy with him.  Unhappy with great cause.  “I am going—­you know that, and—­I have a last word to say.  I tried to say it this afternoon—­out there—­you know—­in the shrubberies, and when you wouldn’t listen—­I—­I respected that.  I respected you.  But—­a time may come when you”—­hurriedly—­“may not always choose to live this wretched life.  There will be a way out of it, Tita—­a way not made by you!"

Tita suddenly feels very cold, chilled to her heart’s core.  She had listened so far as if stunned; but now she wakes, and the face of Marian Bethune seems to look with a cold sneer into hers.

“And after that,” goes on Hescott, “if—­if——­” He breaks down.  “Well, if that comes, you know I—­love you, Tita.”

He tries to take her hand.

“Don’t touch me!” says Tita vehemently.  She pushes his hand from her; such a disdainful little push.  “Oh, I thought you really did love me,” says she, “but not like this!" Suddenly a sort of rage and of anger springs to life within her.  She turns a face, singularly childish, yet with the sad first break of womanhood upon it, to his.  “How dare you love me like this?” says she.