words into her ear, shook her head, but did not speak, though her lover
was gazing with a last, final appeal into her eyes. The delicate girl
was bearing out my estimate of her.

Seeing her thus unresponsive, William flung her hand from him and turned
upon me.

"It's your fault," he cried. "You _would_ come in----"

But, at this, Lucetta, recovering her poise in a moment, cried out
shrilly:

"For shame, William! What has Miss Butterworth to do with this? You are
not helping me with your roughness. God knows I find this hour hard
enough, without this show of anxiety on your part to be rid of me."

"There's woman's gratitude for you," was his snarling reply. "I offer to
take all the responsibilities on my own shoulders and make it right
with--with her sister, and all that, and she calls it desire to get rid
of her. Well, have your own way," he growled, storming down the hall;
"I'm done with it for one."

The young man, whose attitude of reserve, mixed with a strange and
lingering tenderness for this girl, whom he evidently loved without
fully understanding her, was every minute winning more and more of my
admiration, had meanwhile raised her trembling hand to his lips in what
was, as we all could see, a last farewell.

In another moment he was walking by us, giving me as he passed a low bow
that for all its grace did not succeed in hiding from me the deep and
heartfelt disappointment with which he quitted this house. As his figure
passed through the door, hiding for one moment the sunshine, I felt an
oppression such as has not often visited my healthy nature, and when it
passed and disappeared, something like the good spirit of the place
seemed to go with it, leaving in its place doubt, gloom, and a morbid
apprehension of that unknown something which in Lucetta's eyes had
rendered his dismissal necessary.

"Where's Saracen? I declare I'm nothing but a fool without that dog,"
shouted William. "If he has to be tied up another day--" But shame was
not entirely eliminated from his breast, for at Lucetta's reproachful
"William!" he sheepishly dropped his head and strode out, muttering some
words I was fain to accept as an apology.

I had expected to encounter a wreck in Lucetta, as, this episode in her
life closed, she turned toward me. But I did not yet know this girl,
whose frailty seemed to lie mostly in her physique. Though she was
suffering far more than her defence of me to her brother would seem to
denote, t