ht go over the dance----"

Rachel had been thinking; she looked up sharply and stared at Lizzie,
staring as though she had been some stranger whom she saw for the first
time.

"Yes--Come to the Chinese room at four, will you? We'll have tea up
there."

"Yes," said Lizzie, "at four."

They were both of them aware that something, now quite irrevocable, had
been settled by these words.

There was a little old library up in one of the towers, and there Lizzie
went. She had a desperate need of some place where, during the next
hour, she might think and decide upon some plan. The room had little
diamond-paned windows that looked down, on one side, over the courtyard,
and on the other over the garden and the Downs. The shelves went from
ceiling to floor and were filled with books that dimly shone with their
old gold and were dusky in their rich, faded bindings.

It was very seldom that anyone came here; Lizzie was quite alone as,
perched up in one of the deep-seated windows, she looked down at the
garden, saw the stone gate with the solitary gryphon, watched the
swiftly fading afternoon light fill the green lawn as a pot is filled
with water.

Even now, early though it was, the little room was growing dark.

She strove now, resolutely, to discipline her mind. Although the very
thought of Francis Breton now shamed her, it was for him that she must
care. "Poor dear," he was even now, in her heart. "Foolish,
indiscreet--must plunge from one mess into another, needs someone--Oh,
so dreadfully--to help him out."

Her hostility to Rachel did not prevent her from feeling that here was
someone very young, terribly inexperienced, most unhappily
impulsive--the very last in the world to prevent Breton from having
another catastrophe as bad as the early ones.

She must know absolutely what it was that he and Rachel were doing, and
only Rachel could tell her that--And here her feeling about Rachel was
compounded of the strangest mixture of anger and suspicion, of
tenderness and compassion, of sympathy and hard callous indifference.

"Oh!" Lizzie thought, "why has all this come to me? Why wasn't I allowed
just to go on with my life as it was--My life that was so safe and sure
and dull?"--

She was conscious, as she sat there, that she was listening for
something. She felt, in an odd way, that the day had been a direct
continuance of the dream that she had had in the night; all the morning
she had been aware that her ears, in