"That is quite a different thing. Pray never let your sisters hear you talk in such a manner. And as for Blanche, she never saw Captain Vincent before she was married. I don't know who her old love was, she would never tell us. But she was a girl who couldn't do without something of the kind going on. If you knew how hard it has been to get on at all, you would not make matters worse by speaking to me in that way." Amethyst was silent. She had burnt her ships, and outraged all her natural instincts, and she felt impenitent and strong. "A gentleman, asking for Miss Haredale," said a servant at the door. "Sir Richard, I suppose," said Amethyst, standing up. "Well, mother, I'm going down-stairs to accept him--if he asks me. But I'll take care he knows the worst of my family, and I shall tell him that I don't yet know the worst of myself." She went down-stairs, with the evil power still in her heart. The inward force had come to her, not in love, but in hate. There are inspirations from the land of darkness, and these too can make strong. They find their opportunity in self-despair. "Nothing and no one will interfere to save _me_," she thought. She opened the drawing-room door, and found herself face to face, not with Sir Richard Grattan, but with Sylvester Riddell. CHAPTER TWENTY SIX. ACCORDING TO HIS LIGHT. Amethyst's two lovers went out from her presence into the gaslight and the moonlight, and walked through the still busy streets of the West End, hardly exchanging a word with each other. Neither of them had eaten much that day, and Sylvester took Lucian to his club and ordered supper, but he looked white and wretched, and shook his head when his friend pressed him to eat and drink. He hated the public place, the sense of homelessness, he wanted to hide himself like an unhappy dog. At last he said,-- "I can do nothing to make up for the past." "Well, two years is a long time," said Sylvester, whose own feelings were too exacting just then to leave space for much sympathy with Lucian. "Is it? I've done a great many things since we parted; but I've never felt anything but--wanting her. She seems a thousand times more glorious than ever to me, and I am nothing to her--now." "But you didn't think, before you saw her again, that, after all that passed, she had continued to care for you?" said Syl, curiously. "I did not know _then_, if she ever had truly cared for me," said Lucian. "I supposed that she had not, that it had all been a delusion. What else could I think? Even then, I did not forget her. But when I found, when she herself says now, that in that old time, she was real and true--I don't see how any one can change a true love once given. It's a thing I can't conceive possible. It would have seemed a fresh wrong to her to fear it."