In the broad light of day, with friends seated by our sides, it is difficult to realise how keenly a sound such as this tells upon the nerves in the dark silence of the night, but Mildred was of a fearless nature, and after the first shock of surprise, her impulse was to find out the source of the alarm, not to hide her head under the bedclothes and stuff her fingers in her ears, as many another girl would have done in her place. She slipped out of bed, crept across the room to the window, and kneeling on the floor, applied her ear to the open space, listening intently. The windows of the house were dark and lifeless, but as she waited, in straining silence, it seemed to Mildred that a faint murmur of voices reached her ear. Now a long level murmur, now a broken effort of protest, then again the smooth low voice. Mildred turned her eye from one side to the other, calling to mind the different rooms to which the windows belonged. Below the breakfast-room, above the day nursery, to the right her own dressing-room, to the left, in the projecting wing, Lady Sarah's room and that of her maid. Mildred had never realised before how she was cut off from the rest of the household, but the conviction that the voices must come from this last-named room brought with it a throb of relief. Cecile had said that her mistress was often irritably wakeful during the night-time, and had warned her of a possible alarm like the present. If it was only Lady Sarah scolding her maid, there was no reason why she should not go back to bed and sleep comfortably, but in spite of this conclusion she continued to kneel by the window, for the remembrance of those two cries was not easily reasoned away. She had not been able to distinguish the words, but the tone could not be accounted for by mere irritability. Mildred had had ample opportunity of studying the different tones of Lady Sarah's voice, but she had never heard this note before. Cecile had declared that her mistress treated her harshly, but Mildred, like everyone else in the house, had been inclined to think that the opposite view of the situation would be nearer the truth, for the old lady seemed in dread of the clever maid, and fearful of offending her. The old distrust of the Frenchwoman, which had been temporarily forgotten because of her kindness in the matter of the blue dress, awoke afresh in Mildred's breast; she bent her head forward and strained her ears to overhear what was going on within that further room. It seemed as if she had been kneeling by the window for a long time, but it was in reality only a few minutes, before suddenly, sharply, the cry rang out again, to be as quickly stifled, but not before the listener had recognised the voice, and the word which it was struggling to say. "Help! Help!" It was Lady Sarah's voice. She was in trouble, someone was ill-treating her, so that she was fain to raise her poor, quivering voice in an appeal for help.