Her lashes drooped, her head fell back against the top of the chair, and she lost all her woes until Felix’s voice roused her, and she saw the frightened boy standing at her side, shaking her hand and calling piteously upon her.

“Oh!  I thought you were dead!  You looked so white and felt so cold.  Are you very sick?  Shall I go for mamma?”

For a moment she looked in his face with a perplexed, bewildered expression, then made an effort to rise.

“I suppose that I must have fainted, for I had a terrible pain here, and—­” She laid her hand over her heart.

“Felix, let us go down-stairs.  I think if your mother would give me some wine, it might strengthen me.”

Notwithstanding the snow, Mrs. Andrews had gone out; but Felix had the wine brought to the school-room, and after a little while the blood showed itself shyly in the governess’s white lips, and she took the boy’s Latin book and heard him recite his lesson.

The day appeared wearily long, but she omitted none of the appointed tasks, and it was nearly nine o’clock before Felix fell asleep that night.  Softly unclasping his thin fingers which clung to her hand, she went up to her own room, feeling the full force of those mournful words in Eugenie de Guerin’s Journal: 

“It goes on in the soul.  No one is aware of what I feel; no one suffers from it.  I only pour out my heart before God—­and here.  Oh! to-day what efforts I make to shake off this profitless sadness—­ this sadness without tears—­arid, bruising the heart like a hammer!”

There was no recurrence of the physical agony; and after two days the feeling of prostration passed away, and only the memory of the attack remained.

The idea of lionizing her children’s governess, and introducing her to soi-disant “fashionable society,” had taken possession of Mrs. Andrews’s mind, and she was quite as much delighted with her patronizing scheme as a child would have been with a new hobby-horse.  Dreams at which even Macaenas might have laughed floated through her busy brain, and filled her kind heart with generous anticipations.  On Thursday she informed Edna that she desired her presence at dinner, and urged her request with such pertinacious earnestness that no alternative remained but acquiescence, and reluctantly the governess prepared to meet a formidable party of strangers.

When Mrs. Andrews presented Sir Roger Percival, he bowed rather haughtily, and with a distant politeness, which assured Edna that he was cognizant of her refusal to make his acquaintance at the opera.

During the early part of dinner he divided his gay words between his hostess and a pretty Miss Morton, who was evidently laying siege to his heart and carefully flattering his vanity; but whenever Edna, his vis-a-vis, looked toward him, she invariably found his fine brown eyes scrutinizing her face.

Mr. Manning, who sat next to Edna, engaged her in an animated discussion concerning the value of a small volume containing two essays by Buckle, which he had sent her a few days previous.