conscious anguish of doing wrong.

Nor, had her conscience needed them, did it lack reminders. Narcissus
had been persuaded to send the drawings to London to be treated by
lithography, a process of which he knew nothing, but to which M. Raoul,
during his studies in Paris, had given much attention, and apparently
not without making some discoveries--unimportant perhaps, and such as
might easily reward an experimenter in an art not well past its
infancy. At any rate, he had drawn up elaborate instructions for the
London firm of printers, and when the proofs arrived with about a third
of these instructions neglected and another third misunderstood,
Narcissus was at his wits' end, aghast at the poorness of the
impressions, yet not knowing in the least how to correct them.

He gave Dorothea no peace with them. Evening after evening she was
invited to pore upon the drawings over which she and her lover had bent
together; to criticise here and offer a suggestion there; while every
line revived a memory, inflicted a pang. What suggestion could she find
save the one which must not be spoken?--to send, fetch the artist back
from Dartmoor, and remedy all this, with so much beside!

"But," urged Narcissus, "you and he spent hours together. I quite
understood that he had explained the process to you, and on the
strength of this I gave it too little attention. Of course, if one
could have foreseen--" He broke off, and added with some testiness:
"I'd give fifty pounds to have the fellow back, if only for ten
minutes' talk."

"But why couldn't we?" Dorothea asked suddenly, breathlessly.

They were alone by the table under the bookcase. On the far side of
the hall, before the fire, Endymion dozed after a long day with the
partridges. Narcissus's words awoke a wild hope.

"But why couldn't we?" she repeated, her voice scarcely louder than a
whisper.

"Well, that's an idea!" he chuckled. "Confound the fellow, he imposed
on all of us! If we had only guessed what he intended, we might have
signed a petition telling him how necessary he had made himself, and
imploring him, for our sakes, to behave like a gentleman."

"But supposing--supposing he was innocent--that he had never meant--"
She put out a hand to lay it on her brother's. "Hush!" she could have
cried; but it was too late.

"Endymion!" Narcissus called across the room, jocosely.

"Eh! What is it?" Endymion came out of his doze.

"We're in a mess with these drawings, a