angry, agitated. How well I knew the curiosity that
made her so intent to gain admission to me. It was not so much that I
dreaded being a spectacle, as the horror and hatred I felt at being
approached by her coldness and hypocrisy, while I was so sore and
wounded. I was hardly responsible; I don't think I could have borne the
touch of her hand.

But Richard saved me, and sent her away angry. I crept back to the bed,
and lay down on it again. I heard the others whispering as they passed
through the hall. Mary Leighton was crying; Charlotte was silent. I
don't think I heard her voice at all.

After a long while I heard them go down, and go into the dining-room.
They spoke in very subdued tones, and there was only the slightest
movement of china and silver, to indicate that a meal was going on. But
this seemed to give me a more frantic sense of change than anything
else. I flung myself across the bed, and another of those dreadful,
tearless spasms seized me. Everything--all life--was going on just the
same; even in this very house they were eating and drinking as they ate
and drank before--the very people who had talked with him this day; the
very table at which he had sat this morning. Oh! they were so heartless
and selfish: every one was; life itself was. I did not know where to
turn for comfort. I had a feeling of dreading every one, of shrinking
away from every one.

"Oh!" I said to myself, "if Richard is with them at the table, I never
want to see him again."

But Richard was not with them. In a moment or two he came to the door,
only to ask me if I wanted anything, and to say he would come back
by-and-by.

There was a question which I longed so frantically to ask him, but
which I dared not; my life seemed to hang on the answer. _When were they
going to take him away?_ I had heard something about trains and
carriages, and I had a wild dread that it was soon to be.

I went to the door and called Richard back, and made him understand what
I wanted to know. He looked troubled, and said in a low tone,

"At four o'clock we go from here to meet the earliest train. I have
telegraphed his friends, and have had an answer. I am going down myself,
and it is all arranged in the best way, I think. Go and lie down now,
Pauline; I will come and take you down soon as the house is quiet."

Richard went away unconscious of the stab his news had given me. I had
not counted on anything so sudden as this parting. While he was in