While the battle of reason versus love was at its height, Mrs. Murray put her head in the room and asked:  “Edna!  Where are you, Edna?”

“Here I am.”

“Why are you sitting in the dark?  I have searched the house for you.”  She groped her way across the room, lighted the gas, and came to the window.

“What is the matter, child?  Are you sick?”

“I think something must be the matter, for I do not feel at all like myself,” stammered the orphan, as she hid her face on the window-sill.

“Does your head ache?”

“No, ma’am.”

She might have said very truly that her heart did.

“Give me your hand, let me feel your pulse.  It is very quick, but shows nervous excitement rather than fever.  Child, let me see your tongue, I hear there are some typhoid cases in the neighborhood.  Why, how hot your cheeks are!”

“Yes, I shall go up and bathe them, and perhaps I may feel better.”

“I wish you would come into the parlor as soon as you can, for Estelle says Clinton thought you were very rude to him; and though I apologized on the score of indisposition, I prefer that you should make your appearance this evening.  Stop, you have dropped your handkerchief.”

Edna stooped to pick it up, saw Mr. Murray’s name printed in one corner, and her first impulse was to thrust it into her pocket; but instantly she held it towards his mother.

“It is not mine, but your son’s.  He was here about an hour ago and must have dropped it.”

“I thought he had gone out over the grounds with Clinton.  What brought him here?”

“He came to scold me for not shaking hands with his cousin.”

“Indeed! you must have been singularly rude if he noticed any want of courtesy.  Change your dress and come down.”

It was in vain that Edna bathed her hot face and pressed her cold hands to her cheeks.  She felt as if all curious eyes read her troubled heart.  She was ashamed to meet the family—­above all things to see Mr. Murray.  Heretofore she had shunned him from dislike; now she wished to avoid him because she began to feel that she loved him, and because she dreaded that his inquisitorial eyes would discover the contemptible, and, in her estimation, unwomanly weakness.

Taking the basket which contained her sewing utensils and a piece of light needlework, she went into the parlor and seated herself near the centre-table, over which hung the chandelier.

Mr. Murray and his mother were sitting on a sofa, the former engaged in cutting the leaves of a new book, and Estelle Harding was describing in glowing terms a scene in “Phedre,” which owed its charm to Rachel’s marvelous acting.  As she repeated the soliloquy beginning: 

“O toi, qui vois la honte ou je suis descendue, Implacable Venus, suis—­je assez confondue!” Edna felt as if her own great weakness were known to the world, and she bent her face close to her basket and tumbled the contents into inextricable confusion.