me into the
studio!"

Olive sprang to her desk and hid the letter therein. Then, without
speaking--she had no power to speak--she mechanically unlocked the door.

"Well, I am glad to get at you at last," cried Christal, merrily. "I
thought you were going to spend the night here. But what is the matter?
You are as white as a ghost. You can't look me in the face. Why, one
would almost imagine you had been planning a murder, and I was the
'innocent, unconscious victim,' as the novels have it."

"You--a victim!" cried Olive, in great agitation. But by an almost
superhuman effort she repressed it, and added, quietly, "Christal, my
dear, don't mind me. It is nothing--only I feel ill--excited."

"Why, what have you been doing?"

Olive instinctively answered the truth. "I have been sitting here
alone--thinking of old times--reading old letters."

"Whose? nay, but I will know," answered Christal, half playfully, half
in earnest, as though there was some distrust in her mind.

"It was my father's--my poor father's."

"Is that all? Oh, then don't vex yourself about any old father dead and
gone. I wouldn't! Though, to be sure, I never had the chance. Little I
ever knew or cared about mine."

Olive turned away, and was silent; but Christal, who seemed, for some
reason best known to herself, to be in a particularly unreserved and
benignant humour, said kindly, "You poor little trembling thing, how ill
you have made yourself! You can scarcely stand alone; give me your hand,
and I'll help you to the sofa."

But Olive shrank as if there had been a sting in the slender fingers
which lay on her arm. She looked at them, and a slight circumstance,
long forgotten, rushed back upon her memory,--something she had noticed
to her mother the first night that the girl came home. Tracing the
beautiful hereditary mould of the Rothesay line, she now knew why
Christal's hand was like her own father's.

A shiver of instinctive repugnance came over her, and then the
mysterious voice of kindred blood awoke in her heart. She took and
passionately clasped that hand--the hand of _her sister_.

"O Christal! let us love one another--we two, who have no other tie left
to us on earth."

But Christal was rarely in a pathetic mood. She only shrugged her
shoulders, and then stroked Olive's arm with a patronising air. "Come,
your journey has been too much for you, and you had no business to
wander off that way with Mrs. Gwynne; you shall lie down a