Then he was not dead—or, stay, he might be, for did he not say “probably,” not “possibly”? Then, still standing before the dressing-table, she leaned forward, and, putting her face close to the mirror, she muttered, looking into her own deep eyes the while, “Great God! what did I do?” For a full moment she stood thus, then, lifting the powder-puff from the jeweled case, she mechanically swept her cheeks and brow and sat down. Then she caught the letter and read it again, this time more clearly and calmly, “the probable fatal termination,” and again, “until the day after you became the Baroness Von Eulaw.” She looked at her toilette. What was she doing bejeweled and brocaded that night? Where were the sackcloth and ashes she had earned? She arose and pulled the diamonds from their places, and the beautiful robe from her lovely shoulders, and put on a gown of creamy plush, bordered with some dark, rich fur, and, slowly tying the cords, her eyes fell upon the picture at her feet. She took it between her fingers as if it were a dead thing, and thought at the moment that it weighed a pound at the least. And this was Ellen Thornton! Then she thought how old-fashioned her dress looked, and for a moment she felt glad that she had gotten the picture back. Another revulsion of feeling as she looked upon the torn envelope. What would she not suffer for the hope, the uncertainty, she had clung to when she tore that paper half an hour ago? If only the doctors could have said “possibly,” not “probably;” perhaps that was what they meant, and not “probably,” she repeated. Doctors are so clumsy—especially some—and they do so exaggerate in order to magnify the importance of their case, and for a moment she took unction in such logic. Suddenly a new thought took possession. The baron—“where did he come in?” as he himself would have expressed it, and she half smiled at the grotesqueness of the thought. Was she not married? and did she not owe him allegiance as a woman of honor? If she had told him all that her soul held in keeping for another, would he have made her the Baroness Von Eulaw?—Very likely, but she was not prepared to believe it. She had no right to hold him responsible for offenses against her while she was holding perfidy to her heart, and she marveled that she had failed to make this argument a shield against the shafts of her great sorrow and her almost greater chagrin. She would destroy both the letter and the picture, and put away all thought of the unhappy occurrence. But, examining the picture again, she discovered two little punctures just through the pupils of the shadowy eyes, and she thought and queried for the cause of such an accident.