roperty, including this estate, to
Captain Bradleigh and his wife--Miss Aldclyffe's father and mother--on
condition that they took the old family name as well. There's all about
it in the "Landed Gentry." 'Tis a thing very often done.'

'O, I see. Thank you. Well, now I am going. Good-night.'

VI. THE EVENTS OF TWELVE HOURS

1. AUGUST THE NINTH. ONE TO TWO O'CLOCK A.M.

Cytherea entered her bedroom, and flung herself on the bed, bewildered
by a whirl of thought. Only one subject was clear in her mind, and it
was that, in spite of family discoveries, that day was to be the first
and last of her experience as a lady's-maid. Starvation itself should
not compel her to hold such a humiliating post for another instant.
'Ah,' she thought, with a sigh, at the martyrdom of her last little
fragment of self-conceit, 'Owen knows everything better than I.'

She jumped up and began making ready for her departure in the morning,
the tears streaming down when she grieved and wondered what practical
matter on earth she could turn her hand to next. All these preparations
completed, she began to undress, her mind unconsciously drifting away
to the contemplation of her late surprises. To look in the glass for an
instant at the reflection of her own magnificent resources in face and
bosom, and to mark their attractiveness unadorned, was perhaps but the
natural action of a young woman who had so lately been chidden whilst
passing through the harassing experience of decorating an older beauty
of Miss Aldclyffe's temper.

But she directly checked her weakness by sympathizing reflections on the
hidden troubles which must have thronged the past years of the solitary
lady, to keep her, though so rich and courted, in a mood so repellent
and gloomy as that in which Cytherea found her; and then the young girl
marvelled again and again, as she had marvelled before, at the strange
confluence of circumstances which had brought herself into contact with
the one woman in the world whose history was so romantically intertwined
with her own. She almost began to wish she were not obliged to go away
and leave the lonely being to loneliness still.

In bed and in the dark, Miss Aldclyffe haunted her mind more
persistently than ever. Instead of sleeping, she called up staring
visions of the possible past of this queenly lady, her mother's rival.
Up the long vista of bygone years she saw, behind all, the young girl's
flirtation, little or much, with