‘But so long after. You are nervous and hysterical.’ ‘I am only tired. Please don’t worry me,’ retorted Daphne fretfully, wrapping herself tightly in her soft gray shawl, and quickening her pace. She said not a word more till they were inside the Zähringer Hof, when she wished the other three a brief good-night, declaring herself utterly worn out, and tripped lightly upstairs to her room on the second storey. Madoline’s room was next her sister’s, and when she went up a few minutes later, and knocked at the door of communication between the two rooms, Daphne excused herself from opening it. ‘I’m dreadfully sleepy, dear,’ she said; ‘please leave me alone for to-night!’ ‘Willingly, dearest, if you are sure you are not ill.’ ‘Not the least in the world.’ ‘And there is nothing you want Mowser to do for you?’ ‘Nothing. She has unpacked my things. I have everything I want.’ ‘Then good-night, and God bless you.’ ‘Good-night,’ answered Daphne, but invoked no blessing upon the sister she loved so well. Prayer breathed from such a guilty heart would be almost blasphemy. She walked up and down the room for a long time, up and down, up and down, her soul filled with ineffable joy. Yes; guilty, treacherous, vile, ungrateful as she knew herself to be, she could not stifle that wild sense of happiness, the rapture of knowing herself beloved by the man she loved. Nothing but evil could ever come out of that love; nothing but struggle, and sorrow, and pain; yet it was deep delight to have been loved, the one perfect joy that was possible for her upon this earth. To have missed it would have been never to have lived: and now death might come when it would. She had lived her life; she had had her day. That this love was a thing of guilt, a scorpion to be crushed and trodden under her foot, she never questioned. Not for an instant did it enter into her mind that she could profit by Gerald Goring’s inconstancy, that she was to take to herself the lover whose faith had been violated by to-night’s revelation. Never did it occur to her that any alteration in his future or hers was involved in the admissions which each had made to the other. ‘He knows that I love him; he knows how weak and vile I am,’ she said to herself. ‘If Lina were to know too? If she were to see me with the mask off my face, what a monster of perfidy and ingratitude I should seem to her! Oh, I should die of shame. I could never endure the discovery. And to make her unhappy—her to whom I owe so much, my dearest, my best, the guardian angel of my life. Oh, Lina, Lina, if you knew!’ She flung herself on her knees beside the bed, and, with hands clasped above her head, breathed her passionate prayer: ‘Let me die to-night. Oh, Thou who knowest how sinful and weak I am, let me die to-night!’ CHAPTER XXVII. ‘I MAY NOT DON AS EVERY PLOUGHMAN MAY.’