“But, Ermine, if you—­”

“My dear, I am thankful that nothing is amiss with you or Edward.  For the rest, there is nothing but patience.  Now, not another word; you must not lose your sleep, nor take away my chance of any.”

How much the sisters slept they did not confide to one another, but when they rose, Alison shook her head at her sister’s heavy eyelids, and Ermine retorted with a reproachful smile at certain dark tokens of sleeplessness under Alison’s eyes.

“No, not the flowered flimsiness, please,” she said, in the course of her toilette, “let me have the respectable grey silk.”  And next she asked for a drawer, whence she chose a little Nuremberg horn brooch for her neck.  “I know it is very silly,” she said, “but I can’t quite help it.  Only one question, Ailie, that I thought of too late.  Did he hear your name?”

“I think not, Lady Temple named nobody.  But why did you not ask me last night?”

“I thought beginning to talk again would destroy your chance of sleep, and we had resolved to stop.”

“And, Ermine, if it be, what shall I do?”

“Do as you feel right at the moment,” said Ermine, after a moment’s pause.  “I cannot tell how it may be.  I have been thinking over what you told me about the Major and Lady Temple.”

“Oh, Ermine, what a reproof this is for that bit of gossip.”

“Not at all, my dear, the warning may be all the better for me,” said Ermine, with a voice less steady than her words.  “It is not what, under the circumstances, I could think likely in the Colin whom I knew; but were it indeed so, then, Ailie, you had better say nothing about me, unless he found you out.  We would get employment elsewhere.”

“And I must leave you to the suspense all day.”

“Much better so.  The worst thing we could do would be to go on talking about it.  It is far better for me to be left with my dear little unconscious companion.”

Alison tried to comfort herself with this belief through the long hours of the morning, during which she only heard that mamma and Colonel Keith were gone to the Homestead, and she saw no one till she came forth with her troop to the midday meal.

And there, at sight of Lady Temple’s content and calm, satisfied look, as though she were once more in an accustomed atmosphere, and felt herself and the boys protected, and of the Colonel’s courteous attention to her and affectionate authority towards her sons, it was an absolute pang to recognise the hue of eye described by Ermine; but still Alison tried to think them generic Keith eyes, till at length, amid the merry chatter of her pupils, came an appeal to “Miss Williams,” and then came a look that thrilled through her, the same glance that she had met for one terrible moment twelve years before, and renewing the same longing to shrink from all sight or sound.  How she kept her seat and continued to attend to the children she never knew, but the voices sounded like a distant Babel; and she did not know whether she were most relieved, disappointed, or indignant when she left the dining-room to take the boys for their walk.  Oh, that Ermine could be hid from all knowledge of what would be so much harder to bear than the death in which she had long believed!