lding her fingers.

Picotee gasped out something, but was completely deprived of articulate
utterance, and in another moment being unable to control herself at this
sort of first meeting with the man she had gone through fire and water to
be near, and more particularly by the overpowering kiss upon her hand,
burst into hysterical sobbing. Julian, in his inability to imagine so
much emotion--or at least the exhibition of it--in Ethelberta, gently
drew Picotee further forward by the hand he held, and utilized the
solitary spot of light from the mirror by making it fall upon her face.
Recognizing the childish features, he at once, with an exclamation,
dropped her hand and started back. Being in point of fact a complete
bundle of nerves and nothing else, his thin figure shook like a
harp-string in painful excitement at a contretemps which would scarcely
have quickened the pulse of an ordinary man.

Poor Picotee, feeling herself in the wind of a civil d---, started back
also, sobbing more than ever. It was a little too much that the first
result of his discovery of the mistake should be absolute repulse. She
leant against the mantelpiece, when Julian, much bewildered at her
superfluity of emotion, assisted her to a seat in sheer humanity. But
Christopher was by no means pleased when he again thought round the
circle of circumstances.

'How could you allow such an absurd thing to happen?' he said, in a
stern, though trembling voice. 'You knew I might mistake. I had no idea
you were in the house: I thought you were miles away, at Sandbourne or
somewhere! But I see: it is just done for a joke, ha-ha!'

This made Picotee rather worse still. 'O-O-O-O!' she replied, in the
tone of pouring from a bottle. 'What shall I do-o-o-o! It is--not done
for a--joke at all-l-l-l!'

'Not done for a joke? Then never mind--don't cry, Picotee. What was it
done for, I wonder?'

Picotee, mistaking the purport of his inquiry, imagined him to refer to
her arrival in the house, quite forgetting, in her guilty sense of having
come on his account, that he would have no right or thought of asking
questions about a natural visit to a sister, and she said: 'When you--went
away from--Sandbourne, I--I--I didn't know what to do, and then I ran
away, and came here, and then Ethelberta--was angry with me; but she says
I may stay; but she doesn't know that I know you, and how we used to meet
along the road every morning--and I am afraid to tel