Standing before her dressing-table, she found herself counting the last hours of a holiday which had proved more enchanting than she had thought possible. How sorry she would be to leave the curious pretty room in which she found herself! This room, and that next door now turned into a dressing-room, had been fitted up when the wonders of China were first becoming known to the Western world. It was instinct with the strange charm so often found in those old English country houses where Christendom and Goblindom fight for mastery. The greatest poet of his time had spent at Fletchings the honeymoon which formed a beginning to the most disastrous of marriage tragedies; and Septimus Daman, now Barbara's fellow guest, had managed to convey to her his belief that the rooms which she now occupied had been those set aside for the hapless pair. Was it here, so Barbara wondered--here, or perhaps sitting at the lacquer table in the dressing-room--that the bride had written the formal, yet wholly contented, letter to her parents, with its concluding sentence: "I cannot tell you any more for Lord Byron is looking over my shoulder!"--playful, intimate words, written by the proud, headstrong girl who was to lead a later life of such harsh bitterness. Barbara felt a vague retrospective pity for the long-dead writer of these words. How far superior is friendship to what people call love! Every day she was proving the truth of this, her own, and--yes, her friend's--discovery. After those five perfect days, it seemed strange to remember that she had wondered if she were acting rightly in accepting Miss Berwick's invitation. There had not been much time for thought. The note had come only two days after the ball at Halnakeham Castle, and, as she held it in her hand, before telling any of those about her of its contents, there had swept over Barbara Rebell a foreboding memory. Was she about to expose herself to a repetition of what she had gone through during those first hours at the ball? Was she to see Berwick avoiding her company,--gazing at her, when he looked her way, with alien eyes? But then Berwick himself had come, full of eagerness, and with his abrupt first words--"Has Arabella written? That's right!--I think you will like it. My uncle wants me to be over there in order to see something of Daniel O'Flaherty, and we are also to have old Septimus Daman; he always spends part of November at Fletchings"--her fears, her scruples had vanished. Just before leaving the Priory, Barbara's heart had again misgiven her. Madame Sampiero, looking at her with the wide-open, dark-blue eyes which could express so many shades of feeling, had murmured, "Do not be too long away, child. Remember what befell the poor Beast when Beauty stayed away too long!" How could she have had the heart to write, on the second day of her visit, "They want me to stay on till Tuesday"?