ere they maturing a serious
resolve. The suspicion that their father had secret vile designs in
relation to Mrs. Chump, they kept in the background. It was enough for
them that she was to be a visitor, and would thus destroy the great
circle they had projected. To accept her in the circle, they felt, was
out of the question. Wilfrid's plain-speaking broke up the air-bubble,
which they had so carefully blown, and in which they had embarked all
their young hopes. They had as much as given one another a pledge that
their home likewise should be broken up.

"Are you not almost too severe a student?" Mr. Barrett happened to say to
Cornelia, the day after Wilfrid had worried her.

"Do I show the signs?" she replied.

"By no means. But last night, was it not your light that was not
extinguished till morning?"

"We soon have morning now," said Cornelia; and her face was pale as the
first hour of the dawn. "Are you not a late foot-farer, I may ask in
return?"

"Mere restlessness. I have no appetite for study. I took the liberty to
cross the park from the wood, and saw you--at least I guessed it your
light, and then I met your brother."

"Yes? you met him?"

Mr. Barrett gestured an affirmative.

"And he--did he speak?"

"He nodded. He was in some haste."

"But, then, you did not go to bed at all that night? It is almost my turn
to be lecturer, if I might expect to be listened to."

"Do you not know--or am I constitutionally different from others?" Mr.
Barrett resumed: "I can't be alone in feeling that there are certain
times and periods when what I would like to call poisonous influences are
abroad, that touch my fate in the days to come. I know I am helpless. I
can only wander up and down."

"That sounds like a creed of fatalism."

"It is not a creed; it is a matter of nerves. A creed has its 'kismet.'
The nerves are wild horses."

"It is something to be fought against," said Cornelia admonishingly.

"Is it something to be distrusted?"

"I should say, yes."

"Then I was wrong?"

He stooped eagerly, in his temperate way, to catch sight of her answering
face. Cornelia's quick cheeks took fire. She fenced with a question of
two, and stood in a tremble, marvelling at his intuition. For possibly,
at that moment when he stood watching her window-light (ah, poor heart!)
she was half-pledging her word to her sisters (in a whirl of wrath at
Wilfrid, herself, and the world), that she would take the lead in
breakin