“She compelled me to give my promise to go and see her again.  She looks for me to-day.”

“Medoline, have you no sense of propriety?  Mr. Winthrop’s ward visiting, unknown to him, the woman who wrought him such grievous wrong?  Can you expect him to forgive such an act, especially when he was getting to have such confidence in your honesty and purity?”

“You will tell Mr. Winthrop?”

“I must obey him.  It was his hope you would never hear the disgraceful story.  His special command if you did that I must tell him directly.  I promised to do so and I must fulfill that promise, but at a cost, Medoline, that I dare not think of.”

“Will you go directly then?  Maybe this is my last day at Oaklands.  I shall not stay here to suffer his contempt and displeasure.”  I said wearily, my bodily misery dulling to some extent the mental pain; for I was growing sick rapidly.  With difficulty I gained the shelter of my own room, my one haven of refuge in the wide world.  Crouching by the window I watched the mad, hurrying storm outside, and wondering vaguely if nature suffered in this elemental warfare as we did in our tempests of the soul when the very foundations of hope and happiness were getting swept from our feet.  In imagination I re-lived my past months at Oaklands, my intercourse with Mr. Winthrop, his gradually increasing esteem, the friendship, nay rather the comradeship that was being cemented between us over literature and art, the help he was giving me in these, and the rare life that imagination was beginning to picture that we might enjoy through coming years together.

I realized then, as never before, how happy I had been in my new home; and with a clearness that gave me pain came the consciousness how much my guardian had become to me.  After to-day I might never again call Oaklands my home.  If I had gone at once and confessed to Mr. Winthrop on my return that day from Linden Lane that I had met Mrs. Le Grande he could not have been reasonably angry with me; but I had concealed from him the fact, and had also promised her another interview, and now with vision grown suddenly clear I could realize how he would receive my unwilling confession, after a whole week’s silence.  With aching head and heart I wondered at the cruelty of circumstance that forced the innocent to suffer with the guilty.

With my intense nature, so susceptible either to pleasure or pain, those lonely hours in my own room, that bitter day, left their trace on heart and body for long weary weeks.  When at last Mrs. Flaxman came to me, her own face sad and troubled, I no longer felt the cold in my fireless room; for the blood now was rushing feverishly in my veins, and my head throbbing with intense pain.  I listened to what she had to say in a dazed, half-conscious way.  I heard her say something about Mr. Winthrop’s displeasure, but I was too sick to care very much for anything, just then.  I startled her at last by saying:—­“I do not understand what you are saying.  Please wait and tell me some other time.”