It was in a certain measure due to Mrs. Budd's instinctive tact, which taught her when it was advisable to speak and when to keep silent, that she and Miss Baynard had got on so well together. On the present occasion her instinct told her that Nell was in no mood to bear questioning, and she kept a guard on her tongue accordingly. But by the afternoon of the second day her uneasiness had grown to such an extent that she felt she should be lacking in her duty to one so much younger than herself if she refrained any longer from endeavoring to discover what it was that had changed Miss Baynard so unaccountably in so short a space of time. "My dear Elinor, what is it that ails you? Whatever is the matter with you?" she at length summoned up courage to ask. "You are not like the same girl that you were at breakfast-time yesterday." "Am I not? And yet I am the same," replied Nell with a smile which had more of tears than mirth in it. "What is't that ails me, do you ask! Nothing more serious than a fit of the megrims, I assure you. But I am apt to be dangerous at such times. You had better not come too near me; I might grow worse and bite you." Then, before the astonished lady had time to collect her faculties, she found herself hugged and kissed, and left alone. Half a minute later she heard Miss Baynard singing as she went upstairs to her room. Then a door clashed somewhere in the distance, and all was still. Some time in the dead of night Nell lay down on the couch in her bedroom, and presently sank into the deep sleep of utter exhaustion. In that sleep she had a very vivid dream, from which, at the end of a couple of hours, she suddenly awoke. So strongly had the particulars of her dream impressed themselves upon her that she lay for another hour without stirring, turning them over and over in her mind till she had mastered every detail of the scheme which, as she firmly believed, had been revealed to her by some supernatural influence in her sleep. She had scarcely eaten a mouthful of anything since her receipt of her godmother's letter, but this morning she appeared at the breakfast-table as usual, and looking as if the last two days had been blotted out of her existence. She was still a little pale, and dark round the eyes, but the eyes themselves had lost that look of almost fierce despair, as of a creature driven to bay and not knowing which way to turn, which had been their dominant expression for the last eight-and-forty hours. Now they shone with a serene and steadfast lustre, which yet had in it a something of fixed resolution, as if bent on carrying out some hidden purpose, which the busy brain behind was brooding remotely over, even while its outward attention was occupied and given with seeming abandonment to far other things. Mrs. Budd saw and was satisfied, and was far too wise to put any further questions with reference to a state of affairs which was so evidently over and done with.