a lamp on a bracket. At the first
sight of me, Miss Verinder stopped, and hesitated. She recovered herself
instantly, coloured for a moment--and then, with a charming frankness,
offered me her hand.

"I can't treat you like a stranger, Mr. Jennings," she said. "Oh, if you
only knew how happy your letters have made me!"

She looked at my ugly wrinkled face, with a bright gratitude so new to
me in my experience of my fellow-creatures, that I was at a loss how to
answer her. Nothing had prepared me for her kindness and her beauty.
The misery of many years has not hardened my heart, thank God. I was as
awkward and as shy with her, as if I had been a lad in my teens.

"Where is he now?" she asked, giving free expression to her one dominant
interest--the interest in Mr. Blake. "What is he doing? Has he spoken
of me? Is he in good spirits? How does he bear the sight of the house,
after what happened in it last year? When are you going to give him
the laudanum? May I see you pour it out? I am so interested; I am so
excited--I have ten thousand things to say to you, and they all crowd
together so that I don't know what to say first. Do you wonder at the
interest I take in this?"

"No," I said. "I venture to think that I thoroughly understand it."

She was far above the paltry affectation of being confused. She answered
me as she might have answered a brother or a father.

"You have relieved me of indescribable wretchedness; you have given me
a new life. How can I be ungrateful enough to have any concealment
from you? I love him," she said simply, "I have loved him from first to
last--even when I was wronging him in my own thoughts; even when I was
saying the hardest and the cruellest words to him. Is there any excuse
for me, in that? I hope there is--I am afraid it is the only excuse I
have. When to-morrow comes, and he knows that I am in the house, do you
think----"

She stopped again, and looked at me very earnestly.

"When to-morrow comes," I said, "I think you have only to tell him what
you have just told me."

Her face brightened; she came a step nearer to me. Her fingers trifled
nervously with a flower which I had picked in the garden, and which I
had put into the button-hole of my coat.

"You have seen a great deal of him lately," she said. "Have you, really
and truly, seen THAT?"

"Really and truly," I answered. "I am quite certain of what will happen
to-morrow. I wish I could feel as certain of what will h