n. Every body will say I ran away
with some one--or that he sent me away because I was wicked. You all had
a prejudice against me from the very first."

"Yes, in a way," confessed Dorothy. "It always seemed as if we did not
know you and could not get at you, as if you avoided us--with your
heart, I mean;--as if you had resolved we should not know you--as if you
had something you were afraid we should discover."

"Ah, there it was, you see!" cried Juliet. "And now the hidden thing is
revealed! That was it: I never could get rid of the secret that was
gnawing at my life. Even when I was hardly aware of it, it was there.
Oh, if I had only been ugly, then Paul would never have thought of me!"

She threw herself down again and buried her face.

"Hide me; hide me," she went on, lifting to Dorothy her hands clasped in
an agony, while her face continued turned from her. "Let me stay here.
Let me die in peace. Nobody would ever think I was here."

"That is just what has been coming and going in my mind," answered
Dorothy. "It is a strange old place: you might be here for months and
nobody know."

"Oh! wouldn't you mind it? I shouldn't live long. I couldn't, you know!"

"I will be your very sister, if you will let me," replied Dorothy; "only
then you must do what I tell you--and begin at once by promising not to
leave the house till I come back to you."

As she spoke she rose.

"But some one will come," said Juliet, half-rising, as if she would run
after her.

"No one will. But if any one should--come here, I will show you a place
where nobody would find you."

She helped her to rise, and led her from the room to a door in a rather
dark passage. This she opened, and, striking a light, showed an ordinary
closet, with pegs for hanging garments upon. The sides of it were
paneled, and in one of them, not readily distinguishable, was another
door. It opened into a room lighted only by a little window high up in a
wall, through whose dusty, cobwebbed panes, crept a modicum of
second-hand light from a stair.

"There!" said Dorothy. "If you should hear any sound before I come back,
run in here. See what a bolt there is to the door. Mind you shut both.
You can close that shutter over the window too if you like--only nobody
can look in at it without getting a ladder, and there isn't one about
the place. I don't believe any one knows of this room but myself."

Juliet was too miserable to be frightened at the look of it--which