that he turned upon her a sad white face, furrowed with pain and grief, while he said in weary accents—­“Why have you troubled my peace?  I was so happy till you came!” And she cried out—­“Oh, let me go away!  No one wants me!  I have never been loved much in all my life—­but I am loving enough not to wish to give pain to my friends—­let me go away from my dear old home and never come back again, rather than make you wretched!”

And then with a cry she awoke, shivering and half-sobbing, to feel herself the loneliest of little mortals—­to long impotently for her father’s touch, her father’s kiss,—­to pray to that dimly-radiant phantom of her mother’s loveliness which was pictured on her brain, and anon to stretch out her pretty rounded arms with a soft cry of mingled tenderness and pain—­“Oh, I am so sorry!—­so sorry for him!  I know he is unhappy!—­and it’s all my fault!  I wish—­I wish—–­”

But what she wished she could not express, even to herself.  Her sensitive nature was keenly alive to every slight impression of kindness or of coldness;—­and the intense longing for love, which had been the pulse of her inmost being since her earliest infancy, and which had filled her with such passionate devotion to her father that her grief at his loss had been almost abnormally profound and despairing, made her feel poignantly every little incident which emphasised, or seemed to emphasise, her own utter loneliness in the world; and she was just now strung up to such a nervous tension, that she would almost have consented to wed Lord Roxmouth if by so doing she could have saved any possible mischief occurring to John Walden through Roxmouth’s malignancy.  But the shuddering physical repulsion she felt at the bare contemplation of such a marriage was too strong for her.

“Anything but that!”—­she said to herself, with something of a prayer—­“O dear God!—­anything but that!”

Sometimes God hears these little petitions which are not of the orthodox Church.  Sometimes, as it seems, by a strange chance, the cry of a helpless and innocent soul does reach that vast Profound where all the secrets of life and destiny lie hidden in mysterious embryo.  And thus it happens that across the din and bustle of our petty striving and restless disquietudes there is struck a sudden great silence, by way of answer,—­sometimes it is the silence of Death which ends all sorrow,—­sometimes it is the sweeter silence of Love which turns sorrow into joy.

Next day all the guests at the Manor had departed with the exception of three—­Louis Gigue, and the ‘Sisters Gemini,’ namely, Lady Wicketts and Miss Fosby.  With much gush and gratitude for a ‘charming stay—­a delightful time!’ Lady Beaulyon and Mrs. Bludlip Courtenay took leave of their ‘dear Maryllia,’ who received their farewells and embraces with an irresponsively civil coldness.  Lord Charlemont and Mr. Bludlip Courtenay ‘motored’ to London, undertaking with each other to keep up a speed of fifty miles an