In a wonderfully short of space of time the house assumed the appearance which illness always gives. The servants went about their work whispering, and the sitting-rooms were silent and deserted. No one bestowed a thought on Clare. The attendants on the suffering woman, busily engaged in carrying out the orders given them by Dr. Munns, who remained for several hours with his patient; the alarmed husband, who wandered about disconsolately between his own library and his wife's room--all forgot the girl's existence. It was very late--within a few minutes of the usual dinner-hour (an inflexible period at Poynings)--when Clare Carruthers crossed the flower-garden, entered the house by the window through which she had left it, and stole gently upstairs to her own room. She threw her hat and shawl upon her bed and went to her dressing-table. There she stood for some minutes before the glass, holding her disordered hair back with her hands--there were bits of grass and fragments of leaves in it, as though she had been lying with her fair head prone upon the ground--and gazing upon her young misery-stricken face. White about the full pure lips, where the rich blood ordinarily glowed; purple about the long fair eyelids and the blushing cheeks, heavy-eyed,--the girl was piteous to see, and she knew it. The hours that had passed over since she left her uncle's presence in the morning had been laden with horror, with dread, with such anguish as had never in its lightest form touched her young spirit before; and she trembled as she marked the ravages they had made in her face. "What shall I do?" she murmured, as though questioning her own forlorn image in the glass. "What shall I do? I dare not stay away from dinner, and what will they say when they see my face?" She fastened up her hair, and bathed her face with cold water; then returned to the glass to look at it again; but the pallor was still upon the lips, the discoloration was still about the heavy eyelids. As she stood despairingly before the dressing-table, her maid came to her. "The dinner-bell will not ring, ma'am," said the girl. "Mr. Carruthers is afraid of the noise for Mrs. Carruthers." "Ay," said Clare, listlessly, still looking at the disfigured image in the glass. "How is she?" "No better, ma'am; very bad indeed, I believe. But don't take on so, Miss Clare," her maid went on, affectionately. "She is not so bad as they say, perhaps; and, at all events, you'll knock yourself up, and be no comfort to Mr. Carruthers."