'Will you let me stay with you, darling?'

Then Audrey looked at her trim little bed, and then at her mother, and
smiled.

'There is no room. What can you mean, mother dear? and I am not ill; I
am never ill, am I?'

'Thank God at least for that; but you are worse than ill--you are
unhappy, my dear. Will you let me help you to undress, and then sit by
you until you feel you can sleep?'

But Audrey only shook her head with another smile.

'There is no need. Kiss me, mother, and bid me good-night. I shall like
to be with my own self in the darkness. There, another kiss; now go, or
we shall both be frozen;' and Audrey gently pushed her to the door.

'She would not let me stop with her, John!' exclaimed Mrs. Ross, as she
entered her husband's dressing-room. 'She is very calm: unnaturally so,
I thought; she hardly cried at all; she is thinking nothing of herself,
only of him.'

'Do you know it is one o'clock, Emmie?' returned her husband rather
shortly. He was tired and sore, poor man, and in no mood to hear of his
daughter's sufferings. 'The deuce take the woman!' he said to himself
fretfully, as Mrs. Ross meekly turned away without another word; but he
was certainly not alluding to his wife when he spoke. 'From the days of
Eve they have always been in some mischief or other'--from which it may
be deduced that Mrs. Ross was not so far wrong when she thought her
husband was threatened with gout, only his _malaise_ was more of the
mind. He was thinking of the interview that awaited him on the morrow.
'I would as lief cut off my right hand as tell him that he must not have
Audrey,' he said to himself, as he laid his head on the pillow.

Now, as Michael lay awake through the dark hours revolving many things
in his uneasy brain, it occurred to him that he would send a note across
to Cyril as soon as he heard the household stirring, and he carried out
this resolution in spite of drowsiness and an aching head.

'MY DEAR BLAKE,' he wrote,

'Don't bother yourself about early school. I am on the spot, and
can easily take your place. You will want to pull yourself
together, and under the circumstances the boys would be an awful
nuisance. I hope you have got some sleep.

'Yours,

'M. O. BURNETT.'

To this came the following reply, scrawled on a half-sheet of paper:

'Thanks awfully; will accept your offer. Please t