," said Arthur.

"No. She does not say so. But I am afraid it is true all the same.
But, Arthur, I do mean to try and learn. I think Rose is right when she
says there is no one like Graeme."

Her husband agreed with her here, too, and he thought about these things
much more than he said to his wife. It would be a different home to
them all. Without his sister, he acknowledged, and he said to himself,
that he ought to be the last to regret Graeme's decision with regard to
Mr Green and his European tour.

In the meantime, Graeme, not caring to share her thoughts with her
sister just then, had stolen down-stairs again, and sat looking, with
troubled eyes, out into the night. That was at first, while her
conversation with her brother remained in her mind. She was annoyed
that Mr Green had been permitted to speak, but she could not blame
herself for it. Now, as she was looking back, she said she might have
seen it coming; and so she might, if she had been thinking at all of Mr
Green and his hopes. She saw now, that from various causes, with which
she had had nothing at all to do, they had met more frequently, and
fallen into more familiar acquaintanceship than she had been aware of
while the time was passing, and she could see where he might have taken
encouragement where none was meant, and she was grieved that it had been
so. But she could not blame herself, and she could not bring herself to
pity him very much.

"He will not break his heart, if he has one; and there are others far
better fitted to please him, and to enjoy what he has to bestow, than I
could ever have done; and, so that Arthur says nothing about it, there
is no harm done."

So she put the subject from her as something quite past and done with.
And there was something else quite past and done with.

"I am afraid I have been very foolish and wrong," she said, letting her
thoughts go farther back into the day. She said it over and over again,
and it was true. She had been foolish, and perhaps a little wrong.
Never once, since that miserable night, now more than two years ago,
when he had brought Harry home, had Graeme touched the hand or met the
eye of Allan Ruthven. She had frequently seen Lilias, and she had not
consciously avoided him, but it had so happened that they had never met.
In those old times she had come to the knowledge that, unasked, she had
given him more than friendship, and she had shrunk, with such pain and
shame, from t