She thus came home much later than had been expected; Jumbo, Molly, and the little girls were all watching for her, and greeted her eagerly.  The supper was already on the table for her, and she had only just given Fay and Letty the cakes and comfits she had bought at Brentford for them when Jumbo brought the message that his master hoped that madam, if not too much fatigued, would come to him as soon as her supper was finished.

Accordingly, she came without waiting to change her dress, having only taken off her hat and arranged her hair.

She felt guilty, and dreaded the being questioned, yet longed to make her avowal and have all explained.  The usual greetings passed, and then Mr. Belamour said, “I heard your horse hoofs come in late.  You were detained?”

She explained about the shoe, and a few sentences were passing about her sister when she detected a movement, as if a step were stealing towards her, together with a hesitation in the remark Mr. Belamour was making about Mrs. Hunter’s good nature.

Quite irrelevantly came in the whispering voice, “Where is my dearest life?”

“Sir, sir!” she cried, driven at last to bay, “what is this?  Are you one or two?”

“One with you, my sweetest life!  Your own—­your husband!”

Therewith there was a kind of groan further off, and as Aurelia felt a hand on her dress, her fight and distress at the duality were complete.  While, in the dark, the hands were still groping for her, she eluded them, and succeeded in carrying out Harriet’s manoeuvre so far that a quick bright flame leapt forth, lighting up the whole room, and revealing two—­yes, two!  But it did not die away!  In her haste, and in the darkness, she had poured the whole contents of the bottle on the phosphoric cotton, and dropped both without knowing it on a chintz curtain.  A fresh evening breeze was blowing in from the window, open behind the shutters, and in one second the curtain was a flaming, waving sheet.  Some one sprang up to tear it down, leaping on a table in the window.  The table overbalanced, the heavy iron curtain-rod came out suddenly, and there was a fall, the flaming mass covering the fallen!  The glare shone on a strange white face and head as well as on Jumbo’s black one, and with a trampling and crushing the fire died down, quenched as suddenly as it began, and all was obscurity again.

“Nephew, dear boy, speak,” exclaimed Mr. Belamour; and as there was no answer, “Open the shutters, Jumbo.  For Heaven’s sake let us see!”

“Oh! what have I done?” cried poor Aurelia, in horror and misery, dropping by him on the ground, while the opened shutters admitted the twilight of a May evening, with a full moon, disclosing a strange scene.  A youth in a livery riding coat lay senseless on the ground, partly covered by the black fragments of the curtain, the iron rod clenched in one hand, the other arm doubled under him.  A face absolutely white, with long snowy beard and hair hung over him, and an equally white pair of hands tried to lift the head.  Jumbo had in a second sprung down, removed the fallen table, and come to his masters help.  “Struck head with this,” he said, as he tried to unclasp the fingers from the bar, and pointed to a grazed blow close to the temple.