seems very ill," said Agnes, softly, "very ill!"

"You have allowed her studies to prey upon her health," said General
Harrington, seating himself and fixing his cold, clear eyes on the face
of his questioner. "I must hereafter more directly superintend her
education in person. You will have the goodness to inform Mrs.
Harrington of this sudden indisposition."

Agnes changed color. The self-poise of this old man of the world,
baffled even her eager curiosity. She had expected that he would desire
her to keep the whole scene secret; and when he quietly told her to
reveal it to his wife, and took a resenting tone, as if she had herself
been the person in fault, her astonishment was extreme. The General saw
his advantage, and improved upon it. After softly folding the skirts of
his dressing-gown over his knees, and smoothing the silk with his palm,
he took up a volume from the table, and adjusted the gold glasses to his
eyes with more than usual deliberation. Agnes looked at him steadily,
baffled, but not deceived, till his thoughts seemed completely buried in
the volume. As she gazed, the evil of her half-smothered passion broke
out in her glance; and, as the General languidly raised his eyes from
the book, they met hers.

"Is there anything you wait for?" he inquired, meeting that fierce gaze
with his cold eyes. "Ah, I had forgotten, my people may drive the
carriage round--please say as much."

Agnes left the room, biting her lips till they glowed again, and with
her hand clenched in impatient fury. As she closed the door, General
Harrington laid down his book with an impatient gesture.

CHAPTER XXX.

BROTHER AND SISTER.

Lina could not rest. She went to her room, but it seemed so changed, so
unlike her old home, that a terror, that was almost insanity, fell upon
her. The rich blue curtains, to her excited mind, looked sombre against
their underwaves of frost-like lace, and her bed, with its snowy canopy,
now overclouded with damask, had a deadly whiteness about it, that made
her shrink within herself, as if some leprosy had fallen upon her, which
forbade her ever again to approach a thing so pure.

Lina crept into this room sad and disheartened; looking wearily around,
she cowered down on the carpet in the farthest corner, and sat watching
the door, as if she expected some enemy to come in and drive her forth.
At the least sound in the hall she would start and shrink back with a
moan upon her white lip