a single moment a figure like a shadow appeared in it. The light
movement, sudden as a bird's on the wing, would have betrayed her (she
felt) to Jock, even if she had not spoken. But she waved her hand and
called out "Good-night" in a voice full of laughter. "Don't talk
secrets, for we can hear you," she said. "Good-night!" And so vanished
again, with a little echo of laughter from within. The young men were
both excited and disconcerted by this interruption. It gave them a
sensation of shame for the moment as if they had been caught in a
discussion of a forbidden subject; and then a tingling ran through their
veins. Even MTutor for the moment found no fine speech in which to
express his sense of this sudden momentary tantalising appearance of the
mystic woman standing half visible out of the background of the unknown.
He did think some very fine things on the subject after a time, with a
side glance of philosophical reflection that her light laugh of mockery
as she momentarily revealed herself, was an outcome of this sceptical
century, and that in a previous age her utterance would have been a song
or a sigh. But at the moment even Mr. Derwentwater was subjugated by the
thrill of sensation and feeling, and found nothing to say.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

IN SUSPENSE.

It was thus that Bice was engaged while Lucy imagined her asleep in her
innocence, unaware of the net that was being spread for her unsuspecting
feet. Bice was neither asleep nor unsuspecting. She was innocent in a
way inconceivable to the ordinary home-keeping imagination, knowing no
evil in the devices to which she was a party; but she was not innocent
in the conventional sense. That any high feminine ideal should be
affected by the design of the Contessa or by her own participation in it
had not occurred to the girl. She had been accustomed to smile at the
high virtue of those ladies in the novels who would not receive the
addresses of the eldest son of their patroness, and who preferred a
humble village and the delights of self-sacrifice to all the grandeurs
of an ambitious marriage. That might be well enough in a novel, Bice
thought, but it was not so in life. In her own case there was no
question about it. The other way it was which seemed to her the virtuous
way. Had it been proposed to her to throw herself away upon a poor man
whom she might be supposed to love, and so prove herself incapable of
being of any use to the Contessa, and make all her