"I hate to dine without somebody at the table's head," Mr. Edwin Barley said, turning to the door. "If you will not come, I shall ask Charlotte Delves to sit down." "It is nothing to me who sits down when I am not there." He departed with the ungracious reply ringing in his ears: and ungracious I felt it to be. She bolted the door again, and pulled the blue velvet cushion off my head. "Are you smothered, child? Get up. Now, mark me: you must not say a word to Mr. Edwin Barley of what happened at the summer-house. Do not mention it at all—to him, or to any one else." "But suppose I am asked, Selina?" "How can you be asked? Philip King is gone, poor fellow; George Heneage is not here, and who else is there to ask you? You surely have not spoken of it already?" she continued, in a tone of alarm. I had not spoken of it to any one, and told her so. Jemima had questioned me as to the cause of my terror, when I ran in from the wood, and I said I had heard a shot and a scream I had not courage to say more. "That's well," said Selina. She sent me to rest, ordering Jemima to stay by me until I was asleep. "The child may feel nervous," she remarked to her, in an undertone, but the words reached me. And I suppose Jemima felt nervous, for one of the other maids came too. The night passed; the morning came, Sunday, and with it illness for Mrs. Edwin Barley. I gathered from Jemima's conversation, while she was dressing me, that Selina had slept alone: Mr. Edwin Barley, with his brother and some more gentlemen, had been out a great part of the night looking for George Heneage. It was so near morning when they got back that he would not go to his wife's room for fear of disturbing her. I ran in when I went downstairs. She lay in bed, and her voice, as she spoke to me, did not sound like her own. "Are you ill, Selina? Why do you speak so hoarsely?" "I feel very ill, Anne. My throat is bad—or my chest, I can scarcely tell which: perhaps it is both. Go downstairs, and send Miss Delves to me." I have said that I was an imaginative, thoughtful, excitable child, and as I hastened to obey her, one sole recollection (I could have said fear) kept running through my brain. It was the oracular observation made by Duff, relating to his mistress and the fog: "It's enough to give her her death!" Suppose she _had_ caught her death? My fingers, fastening my narrow waist-band, trembled at the thought. The first thing I saw when I went down was a large high screen of many folds, raised across the hall, shutting out part of it from view. It seemed to strike me back with fear. Sarah was coming out of the dining-room with a duster in her hand: it was early yet. I caught hold of her gown. "Sarah, what is behind there?" "The same that was last night, Miss," she answered. "Nothing is to be moved until the coroner has come. "Have they taken Mr. Heneage?" "Not that I have heard of, Miss. One of the police was in just now, and he told Miss Delves there was no news."