"I will give you my answer
then.... I will not forget! I will not be thoughtless and foolish any
more.... But let me go home first: I must go home. I cannot stay here
alone!"

"You cannot go home, Kitty," said Hugo, modulating his voice to one of
extreme softness and sweetness. He knelt before her, and took both her
hands in his. "You left Mrs. Baxter's yesterday afternoon--to meet me,
you said. Where have you been since then?--that will be the first
question. You cannot go home without me now: what would the world say?
Don't you understand?"

"What does it matter what the world says? My father would know that it
was all right," said Kitty, helplessly.

"Would your father take you in?" Hugo whispered. "Would he not rather
say that you must have planned it all, that you were not to be trusted,
that you had better have married me when I asked you? For, if you leave
this house before you are my wife, Kitty, I shall not ask you again to
marry me. Are you so simple as not to know why? You would be
compromised: that is all. You need not have obliged me to tell you so."

She wrenched her hands away from him and put them before her eyes.

"Oh, I see it all now," she moaned. "I am trapped--trapped. But I will
not marry you. I will die rather. Oh, Rupert, Rupert! why do you not
come?"

And then she fell into a fit of hysterical shrieking, succeeded by a
swoon, from which Hugo found some difficulty in recovering her. He was
obliged to call the nurse to his aid, and the nurse and the kitchen-maid
between them carried the girl upstairs and placed her on the bed. Here
Kitty came to herself by degrees, but it was thought well to leave the
kitchen-maid, Elsie, beside her for some time, for as soon as she was
left alone the hysterical symptoms reappeared. She saw Hugo no more that
day, but on the following morning, when she sat pale and listless over
the fire in her sitting-room, he reappeared. He spoke to her gently, but
she gave him no answer. She looked at him with blank, languid eyes, and
said not a word. He was almost frightened at her passivity. He thought
that he had perhaps over-strained matters: that he had sent her out of
her mind. But he did not lose hope. Kitty, with weakened powers of body
and mind, would still be to him the woman that he loved, and that he had
set his heart upon winning for his wife.

That day passed, and the next, with no change in her condition. Hugo
began to grow impatient. He resolved to try s