er during the morning there was no hint of trouble
in her welcome of him, nor did he guess that any disquieting news had
reached her. And his conclusion, though not actually true, was justly
drawn, for the peace and the sense of security which she felt in his
presence was of a kind that nothing else, except danger and disaster to
it itself, could disturb.

It was a very tender, a very real part of her nature that was
troubled, but the trouble did not reach down into these depths. Nor
did she mean to speak of this trouble to him at all; a promise had
been made by her to keep it as secret as could be. Hitherto the secret
had been completely kept; it had passed the lips of none of the few
who knew. But to-day she would be obliged to speak of it to Alice, for
her plan to avert disaster was already half formed, but she dared not
embark on it alone without counsel from another. For an utterly
unlooked-for stroke of fate, supreme in its irony, that Daisy should
be meditating marriage with the one man in the world whom it was
utterly impossible that she should marry, had fallen, and at all costs
the event must be averted.

CHAPTER IX.

The two girls, as had been already arranged, set off during the
morning for the river-side house at Bray, where they would be joined
next day by Lady Nottingham and the rest of her party; and Aunt
Jeannie, returning home shortly before lunch, found that Daisy and
Gladys had already gone, and that the hour for her consultation with
her friend was come. For the situation admitted of no delay: in a sky
that till yesterday had been of dazzling clearness and incomparable
serenity there had suddenly formed this thunder-cloud, so to speak,
hard, imminent, menacing. It was necessary, and immediately necessary
(such was the image under which the situation presented itself to her
mind), to put up a lightning-conductor over Daisy's room. It was the
nature of the thunder-cloud that she had now to make known to Lady
Nottingham: that done, between them they had to devise the
lightning-conductor, or approve and erect that one which she had
already designed in her mind during the sleepless hours of the night
before. It was of strange design: she hardly knew if she had the
skill to forge it. For the forging had to be done by her.

They lunched together, and immediately afterwards went to Lady
Nottingham's sitting-room, where they would be undisturbed, for she
had given orders that neither the most ur