‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I retorted; but at that moment the spirit balloon rose in the air, and half a dozen voices joined in a chorus of admiration at the height and depth and length and breadth of the cavern we stood in, and the glittering clusters of stalactites which the light momentarily revealed as it majestically sailed past them. I looked with the rest, but my thoughts were far away from the scene around me. A question was puzzling my brain which I felt I could not give up until I had unravelled. _For whom_ had Cave Charteris intended the whisper which by mistake he addressed to me? It worried me all the way home, and long after I had reached it. His subsequent query seemed to imply that he had believed Sophy Markham stood next him, but I could not credit that he had said those words except with the intent to mislead me. Was it possible that he could have seriously called Miss Markham by such a term of endearment, or addressed her with so much earnestness in his voice? And if it were not possible, then—did he intend that speech for Ange, who would have been standing between us had she not slipped round to my other side at the very moment we were left in darkness? _Cave Charteris and Ange!_ The very combination of names seemed like sacrilege in my ears. The man who had made love to me, and left me in years gone by—who had tried to make love to me only a few weeks back—to have the happiness of that innocent trusting child in his hands! It was too horrible to think of. Whatever his protestations or passions for the moment might be, he was cold and cruel by nature. I could read it in his eyes and the sentiments in which he expressed his opinions, and I trembled to think what Ange’s fate might prove, if he aroused all her deepest feelings, and then basely deserted her as he had deserted me. What was I to do? What was it my duty to do—both towards her and him! If the sentences I heard were meant for Ange, it was not the first time Mr. Charteris had addressed her as a lover. That was evident. ‘My own darling!’ he had said, ‘how much I love you!’ Men don’t call women their ‘own’ until they have proved they are willing to be so. I knew enough of human nature to know that. And then he had added, ‘How I long to be alone with you _again_,’ which showed that whoever he spoke to had already kept appointments with him.