He seemed to be still reluctant to notice her—­on the one occasion of all others when she was looking her best!  But he answered at last.

“My dear child, it is impossible that you should offend me; you have misunderstood and mistaken me.  Don’t suppose—­pray don’t suppose that I am changed or can ever be changed toward you.”

He emphasized the kind intention which those words revealed by giving her his hand.

But the next moment he drew back.  There was no disguising it, he drew back as if he wished to get away from her.  She noticed that his lips were firmly closed and his eyebrows knitted in a frown; he looked like a man who was forcing himself to submit to some hard necessity that he hated or feared.

Sydney left the room in despair.

He had denied in the plainest and kindest terms that he was changed toward her.  Was that not enough?  It was nothing like enough.  The facts were there to speak for themselves:  he was an altered man; anxiety, sorrow, remorse—­one or the other seemed to have got possession of him.  Judging by Mrs. Linley’s gayety of manner, his wife could not possibly have been taken into his confidence.

What did it mean?  Oh, the useless, hopeless question!  And yet, again and again she asked herself:  what did it mean?

In bewildered wretchedness she lingered on the way to her room, and stopped at the end of a corridor.

On her right hand, a broad flight of old oak stairs led to the bed-chambers on the second floor of the house.  On her left hand, an open door showed the stone steps which descended to the terrace and the garden.  The moonlight lay in all its loveliness on the flower-beds and the grass, and tempted her to pause and admire it.  A prospect of sleepless misery was the one prospect before her that Sydney could see, if she retired to rest.  The cool night air came freshly up the vaulted tunnel in which the steps were set; the moonlit garden offered its solace to the girl’s sore heart.  No curious women-servants appeared on the stairs that led to the bed-chambers.  No inquisitive eyes could look at her from the windows of the ground floor—­a solitude abandoned to the curiosity of tourists.  Sydney took her hat and cloak from the stand in a recess at the side of the door, and went into the garden.

Chapter VIII.

Mrs. Presty Makes a Discovery.

The dinner-party had come to an end; the neighbors had taken their departure; and the ladies at Mount Morven had retired for the night.

On the way to her room Mrs. Presty knocked at her daughter’s door.  “I want to speak to you, Catherine.  Are you in bed?”

“No, mamma.  Come in.”

Robed in a dressing-gown of delicately-mingled white and blue, and luxuriously accommodated on the softest pillows that could be placed in an armchair, Mrs. Linley was meditating on the events of the evening.  “This has been the most successful party we have ever given,” she said to her mother.  “And did you notice how charmingly pretty Miss Westerfield looked in her new dress?”