ion--yes,
that was it; and again he looked at Janey, who saw his looks, and
wondered much what she ought to do--go away, as he evidently wished her,
or stay and listen, which was the eager desire of her mind. When Ursula
lifted her head from her darning, and looked at him with cheeks
alternately white and crimson, Janey felt herself grow hot and
breathless with kindred excitement, and knew that the moment had come.

"Mr. Northcote," said Ursula, looking at him fixedly, so fixedly that a
nervous trembling ran over him, "I have a question to ask you. You have
been coming to us very often, and perhaps papa may know, but I don't. Is
it true that you made a speech about Reginald when you first came here?"

Janey, looking eagerly on, saw Northcote grow pale, nay, grey in the
fresh daylight. The colour seemed to ebb out of him. He started very
slightly, as if waking up, when she began to speak, and then sat looking
at her, growing greyer and greyer. A moment elapsed before he made any
reply.

"Yes, I did," he said, with a half-groan of pain in his voice.

"You did! really you did! Oh!" cried Ursula, the hot tears falling
suddenly out of her eyes, while she still looked at him, "I was hoping
that it was all some horrible mistake, that you would have laughed. I
hoped you would laugh and say no."

Northcote cleared his throat; they were waiting for him to defend
himself. Janey, holding herself on the leash, as it were, keeping
herself back from springing upon him like a hound. Ursula gazed at him
with great blazing reproachful eyes; and all he could do was to give
that sign of embarrassment, of guilt, and confusion. He could not utter
a word. By the time he had got himself wound up to the point of speech,
Ursula, impatient, had taken the words out of his mouth.

"Reginald is my brother," she said. "Whatever is against him is against
us all; we have never had any separate interests. Didn't you think it
strange, Mr. Northcote, to come to this house, among us all, when you
had been so unkind to him?"

"Miss May--"

He made a broken sort of outcry and motion of his head, and then cleared
his throat nervously once more.

"Did you think how your own brothers and sisters would have stood up for
you? that it would have been an offence to them if anybody had come to
the house who was not a friend to you? that they would have had a
right--"

"Miss May," said the culprit; "all this I have felt to the bottom of my
heart; that I