"Nothing will do me good, ma'am," she answered dryly. "Oh, Kingston, I am so sorry!" "Go down to your visitor, ma'am, and don't mind me," said Kingston, turning her back on the girl with unusual abruptness. "It isn't much that I've got to be sorry for, after all." "If there is anything I can do to help you, you will let me know, will you not?" said Lesley. But Kingston's "Yes, ma'am," fell with a despairing cadence on her ear. Kingston had been to her husband's lodgings only to find that he had disappeared. He had left some of his clothes, and the few articles of furniture that belonged to his wife, and had never said that he was going away. The accident that had made Francis Trent a patient at the hospital where Lady Alice visited was of course unknown to his landlady, as also to his wife. And as his memory did not return to him speedily, poor Mary Trent had been left to suffer all the tortures of anxiety for some weeks. At first she thought that some injury had happened to him--perhaps that he was dead: then a harder spirit took possession of her, and she made up her mind that he had finally abandoned her--had got money from Oliver and departed to America without her. She might have asked Oliver whether this were so, but she was too proud to ask. She preferred to eat out her heart in solitude. She believed herself deserted forever, and the only grain of consolation that remained to her was the hope of making herself so useful and acceptable to Lesley Brooke, that when Lesley married she would ask Mary Kingston to go with her to her new home. Kingston had made up her mind about the man that Lesley was to marry. She had seen him come and go: she had seen him look at her dear Miss Lesley with ardently admiring eyes: she believed that he would be a true and faithful husband to her. But she knew more than Lesley was aware of yet. Lesley went slowly down into the drawing-room. She remembered Captain Duchesne very well, and she was glad to think of seeing him again. And yet there was an indefinable shrinking--she did not know how or why. Harry Duchesne was connected with her old life--with the Paris lights, the Paris drawing-rooms, the stately old grandfather, the graceful mother--the whole assembly of things that seemed so far away. She did not understand her whole feeling, but it suddenly appeared to her as if Captain Duchesne's visit was a mistake, and she had better get it over as soon as possible. It must be confessed that this sensation vanished as soon as she came into the actual presence of Captain Duchesne. The young man, with his grave, handsome features, his drooping, black moustache, his soldierly bearing, had an attraction for her after all. He reminded her of the mother whom she loved. It was not very easy to get into conversation with him at first. He seemed as ill at ease as Lesley herself had been. But when she fell to questioning him about Lady Alice, his tongue became unloosed.