worded. It was, therefore, with
positive joy that, one afternoon in spring, she was informed by her maid
that Captain Duchesne was in the drawing-room, for she felt sure that he
would be able to tell her many details that she did not know. She made
haste to go down, and yet, before she went, she paused to say a word to
Kingston, who had brought her the welcome news.

"I wish you would go out, Kingston; you don't look at all well, and this
spring air might do you good."

It was certainly easy to see that Kingston was not well. During the past
few weeks her face had become positively emaciated, her eyes were
sunken, and her lips were white. She looked like a person who had
recently passed through some illness or misfortune. Lesley had tried,
delicately and with reserve, to question her; but Kingston had never
replied to any of her inquiries. She would shut up her lips, and turn
away with the look of one who could keep a secret to the grave.

"Nothing will do me good, ma'am," she answered dryly.

"Oh, Kingston, I am so sorry!"

"Go down to your visitor, ma'am, and don't mind me," said Kingston,
turning her back on the girl with unusual abruptness. "It isn't much
that I've got to be sorry for, after all."

"If there is anything I can do to help you, you will let me know, will
you not?" said Lesley.

But Kingston's "Yes, ma'am," fell with a despairing cadence on her ear.

Kingston had been to her husband's lodgings only to find that he had
disappeared. He had left some of his clothes, and the few articles of
furniture that belonged to his wife, and had never said that he was
going away. The accident that had made Francis Trent a patient at the
hospital where Lady Alice visited was of course unknown to his landlady,
as also to his wife. And as his memory did not return to him speedily,
poor Mary Trent had been left to suffer all the tortures of anxiety for
some weeks. At first she thought that some injury had happened to
him--perhaps that he was dead: then a harder spirit took possession of
her, and she made up her mind that he had finally abandoned her--had got
money from Oliver and departed to America without her. She might have
asked Oliver whether this were so, but she was too proud to ask. She
preferred to eat out her heart in solitude. She believed herself
deserted forever, and the only grain of consolation that remained to her
was the hope of making herself so useful and acceptable to Lesley
Brooke, that when