“I wish to ask you a few questions.  Was it actual bodily sickness, physical pain, that kept you in your room during dinner, at which I particularly desired your attendance?”

“I cannot say that it was.”

“You had no fever, no headache, no fainting-spell?”

“No, sir.”

“Then why did you absent yourself?”

“I felt unhappy, and shrank from seeing any one:  especially strange guests.”

“Unhappy?  About what?”

“My heart ached, and I wished to be alone.”

“Heart-ache, so early?  However, you are in your seventeenth year, quite old enough, I suppose, for the premonitory symptoms.  What gave you heart-ache?”

She was silent.

“You feared my displeasure, knowing I had cause to feel offended, when making a pretence of deferring to my wishes, you hurried away from my office, just as I was returning to it?  Why did you not wait?”

“I was afraid you would refuse your permission, and I wanted so very much to go to Mrs. Mason’s.”

Above all other virtues he reverenced and admired stern unvarnished truth, and this strong element of her reticent nature had powerfully attracted him.

“Little girl, am I such a stony-hearted ogre?” A strangely genial smile wanned and brightened his usually grave cold face, and certainly at that moment Erle Palma showed one aspect of his nature never exhibited before to any human being.

“What a fascinating person this poor old Mrs. Mason must be; absolutely tempting you to disobedience.  Does she not correspond with the saints in Oude?”

“If you mean Mr. Lindsay and his mother, she certainly hears from them occasionally.”

“Why not phrase it Mrs. Lindsay and her son?  Was it the dreadful news that malarial fever is epidemic at the Missions, or that the Sepoys are threatening another revolt, that destroyed your appetite, unfitted you for the social amenities at the dinner-table, and gave you heart-ache?”

“If there is such bad news, I did not hear it Mrs. Mason was not at home.”

“Indeed!  Then whom did you see?”

“When I ascertained she was absent, I had already sent the carriage away, and I came home, after stopping a few moments in ——­ Square.”

She grew very white as she spoke, and he saw her lips quiver.

“Regina, what is the matter?”

She did not reply; and bending toward her, he said in a low, winning voice entirely unlike his usual tone: 

“Lily, trust your guardian.”

Looking into his brilliant eyes, she felt tempted to tell him all, to repose implicitly upon his wisdom and guidance, but the image of Peleg Peterson rose like a hideous warning spectre.

Readily interpreting the varying expression of a countenance which he had so long and carefully studied, he continued: 

“You wish to tell me frankly, yet you shrink from the ordeal.  Lily, what have you done that you blush to confess to me?”