eks; the beauty died out of
her eyes; her face hardened horribly with a silent despair. "It's even
baser work than I bargained for," she said, "to deceive _him_." After
pacing to and fro in the room for some minutes, she stopped wearily
before the glass over the fire-place. "You strange creature!" she
murmured, leaning her elbows on the mantelpiece, and languidly
addressing the reflection of herself in the glass. "Have you got any
conscience left? And has that man roused it?"

The reflection of her face changed slowly. The color returned to her
cheeks, the delicious languor began to suffuse her eyes again. Her lips
parted gently, and her quickening breath began to dim the surface of
the glass. She drew back from it, after a moment's absorption in her own
thoughts, with a start of terror. "What am I doing?" she asked herself,
in a sudden panic of astonishment. "Am I mad enough to be thinking of
him in _that_ way?"

She burst into a mocking laugh, and opened her desk on the table
recklessly with a bang. "It's high time I had some talk with Mother
Jezebel," she said, and sat down to write to Mrs. Oldershaw.

"I have met with Mr. Midwinter," she began, "under very lucky
circumstances; and I have made the most of my opportunity. He has just
left me for his friend Armadale; and one of two good things will happen
to-morrow. If they don't quarrel, the doors of Thorpe Ambrose will be
opened to me again at Mr. Midwinter's intercession. If they do quarrel,
I shall be the unhappy cause of it, and I shall find my way in for
myself, on the purely Christian errand of reconciling them."

She hesitated at the next sentence, wrote the first few words of it,
scratched them out again, and petulantly tore the letter into fragments,
and threw the pen to the other end of the room. Turning quickly on her
chair, she looked at the seat which Midwinter had occupied, her foot
restlessly tapping the floor, and her handkerchief thrust like a gag
between her clinched teeth. "Young as you are," she thought, with her
mind reviving the image of him in the empty chair, "there has been
something out of the common in _your_ life; and I must and will know
it!"

The house clock struck the hour, and roused her. She sighed, and,
walking back to the glass, wearily loosened the fastenings of her dress;
wearily removed the studs from the chemisette beneath it, and put them
on the chimney-piece. She looked indolently at the reflected beauties of
her neck and