‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,’ says the Psalmist, ‘from whence cometh my help.’ And, in a certain degree, it was so with her. A voice supreme and unerring spoke to her; all her nature, every fibre seemed to bow to an overwhelming intuition which directed her towards the man who stood before her, looking so earnestly down upon her. She loved him, and that with a love which had grown into a great passion, and an absorbing one. But it was something different—something deeper and higher than even this great love which impelled her action now;—instinct, some might call it, and others say that she had naturally a gift for reading character correctly, and for discerning which persons were, and which were not to be relied upon. She herself would have said that God inspired her. She sat motionless for a moment, bending to this inner voice which spoke to her, acknowledging what her belief told her was the providential arrival of the one person whom she would most implicitly trust—and fighting down the unwillingness—natural and good in itself, but which she felt it was useless to stand upon now—to speak openly of such things as had happened, to a man who was neither her husband, her father, nor her brother. And then, her resolution taken, or rather, that importunate inner voice obeyed, she got up, and leaning over the table towards him, said— ‘I want to know if you will help me in a very great trouble?’ ‘With every power that I have, I will help you,’ he replied, unhesitatingly, and waited to hear what it was that he had to do. ‘Since I came in I have heard of a thing that has happened. I hardly know how to tell you of it. It makes me feel as if I had been laughing and amusing myself in some room, underneath which another person was being tortured to death.’ Her lips were parched; her eyes dilated. ‘If I did not trust you _entirely_,’ she said, as if she appealed to him, ‘I could not tell you.’ For a moment she was silent, while Michael waited, and then, turning to him again, told him, unfalteringly, of the discovery she had made, and repeated, word for word, the conversation between herself and Ada. Michael listened in perfect silence; it was, he felt, the only way in which to hear such a tale. ‘I have sent her home,’ Eleanor said at last, ‘that I might try to think. She is safe for to-night, since she says her mother is away, and her father will not return before eleven to-morrow. I have told her to come here early—at nine to-morrow morning. I thought I would keep her here till her parents knew. I think her father has a heart, but I cannot endure that woman, her mother. I feel that she would rail at her—not because she had done wrong, but because she had failed in getting married to Otho.’ He nodded. ‘Do you think I have done right?’ ‘Perfectly right. There was nothing else to be done. Do you know where—he—is?’ He spoke as if he found a difficulty in finding a term by which to speak of Otho.