"I wonder if old Harrison would tell you? Oh! do be a good soul and help me if you can," and she laid her pretty, white, be-ringed hand on his arm and looked into his face. "It's so stupid to be bound like this to a man who is perfectly indifferent to you, and, moreover, who actually detests you! I swear to you he looked as if he really hated me that day on Westminster bridge. And why should I waste all my youth and my life? His money is not worth it." "It is a very hard case, certainly." "I have felt this lately," said Kathleen Weir, in rather a marked manner; "before, I think I did not care." Again she looked in Webster's face, and with a sort of discomfort his keen dark eyes fell before her large, restless, gray ones. He was not a vain man, but a vague consciousness smote into his heart that this handsome woman had begun to regard him with different feelings to his own. This idea made him more chary of his visits and colder in his manner. And Kathleen Weir, quick to perceive this, also drew back. Thus some weeks passed without him seeing her, when one morning an announcement in the _Times_ brought her affairs more prominently before his mind. This was no less than a notice in the obituary column of the sudden death of the squire of Woodlea: "On the 21st inst., at Woodlea Hall, Phillip Temple, Esq., aged 75, of heart disease." Webster read the announcement twice over, thinking all the while of the great changes it might bring. Not to the fair black-robed probationer at St. Phillip's Hospital, though, he decided; it could not touch her very nearly now, but to John Temple and Kathleen Weir. And yet on second thoughts he remembered it would bring Temple back to England, and would make the friends of the missing girl more eager in their inquiries to learn her fate. John Temple would probably now be forced to tell what he knew, and the fact of his first marriage might be brought home to him. Therefore, the knowledge of the squire's death disquieted Webster exceedingly, and the day did not pass without his receiving further news concerning it. The evening post in fact brought him a letter from Kathleen Weir, and the notice from the _Times_ of Mr. Temple's death fell out of it when Webster opened the envelope. The actress had evidently written in a state of great excitement.