st of which she was
unaware. The sleeping face was more instinct with life, though Sleep
is said to be the brother of Death, than the shadowed eyes that watched.

Miss Wycliffe, she reflected, had only to wish for a thing, and
possession was assured. Above all, it was the thought that she might
also have taken her lover from her which kept the girl's eyes fixed in
wistful speculation. She had ventured to write again to Emmet, but
without result; he had even passed her blindly on the street, leaving
her faint, with a whispered greeting dying pathetically on her lips.
How could she contend with her mistress, if what she feared were true?
Yet how slender her cause of suspicion! Only the incident of the ring,
which Miss Wycliffe had explained most naturally; but the final warning
against Emmet remained in her mind as a declaration of possession.

It was characteristic of Lena's nature that she yielded to no one in
appreciation of Felicity's beauty. Chastened rather than embittered by
a conviction of her own loss, she was not without a consciousness of
the appealing change which sleep now made in the woman she had such
cause to dread. No hint remained of that imperious quality which
moulded others to her will. She seemed to have grown softer, and there
was something childlike in the position of her arm on the counterpane,
in her hand turned palm upward, in her half-curled fingers. A lover,
were he a poet, might have likened them to the petals of a flower that
had begun to open with returning day. Presently the sleeper stirred
and opened her eyes, dimly aware of a retreating presence and a closing
door, but when, an hour later, she awoke fully, the impression was like
that of a dream.

It was ten o'clock when she rang her bell and ordered breakfast in her
room. This order was as unusual as her late sleep, but she seemed to
herself to have awakened a different person, one in whom such small
changes of action were merely an index of greater possibilities. She
received her father's inquiries through Lena with indifference, and
sent back word that she had been only over-tired. Knowing that he
lingered below to see her, she delayed deliberately until he should
grow impatient and leave the house, for she wished to take up again the
train of thought that had kept her so long awake the previous night.
At present, her sole concern was of herself and of her lover.

Having placed the steaming cup of coffee beside her on t