"Miss Kemp," Barbara's voice sank to a whisper, "I want you to do something for me. That fire which you have so kindly lighted has made me think of it. Will you go into my room, two doors from here, and bring me a packet of letters you will find in my dressing-table drawer? The drawer is locked, but the key is in my purse. When you have brought it, I want you to burn the letters, here, before me," and as Lucy was turning to obey her, she added, "Take one of the candles. Mr. Boringdon said the two rooms were to be left exactly as they are, and everything must be dripping with water, and in fearful confusion." Lucy never forgot her little expedition down the dark passage, and the strange scene which met her eyes in the two rooms which had evidently been, till that night, as neat, as delicately clean, as was her own at the Grange. Well was it for poor Barbara that she had so few personal treasures. But the dressing-table had escaped injury save from the water, which in the bedroom had actually done more harm than the fire. When she got back into the room where Mrs. Rebell was sitting, it seemed to Lucy that Barbara had changed in the short interval--that she looked, not well, as she had done when Lucy had first seen her half an hour before, but very, very ill. The colour now lay in patches on her cheek, and she watched with growing feverishness the burning of the few letters, from each of which, as she put it in the bright crackling fire, Lucy averted her eyes, a fact which Mrs. Rebell, in spite of her increasing dizziness and pain, saw and was grateful for. "Miss Kemp," the speaker's voice was very low, "come here, close to me. Someone may come in, and I am feeling so strange----Perhaps I may forget what I want to tell you. You know Mr. Berwick?" Lucy was kneeling down by the arm-chair, and Barbara put her right hand on the girl's slight shoulder--"But of course you do, I was forgetting the ball----Why, he danced with you. If I die, only if I die, promise me----" an agonised look came into the dark eyes-- "I promise," said Lucy steadily; "only if you die----" "If I die, you are to tell him that I cared as he wished me to care,--that when I sent him away, and in the letters I have written to him since, I said what was not true----" Lucy felt the burning hand laid on her shoulder press more heavily: "No one else must ever know, but you promise that you will tell him----" "I promise," said Lucy again. "I will tell him exactly what you have told me, and no one else shall ever know." A slight noise made her look round. Doctor McKirdy stood in the doorway. He was bare-headed, but he still wore the great coat in which he had driven from Halnakeham. He was pale, his plain face set in a watchful, alert grimace, as his eyes took in every detail of the scene, of the room before him.