"That" was a man whom her eyes, being misty with tears, Lady Marabout had brushed against, as she ascended the staircase, ere she perceived him, and who, passing on with a muttered apology, was down in the hall and out of the door Mason held open before she had recovered the shock of the rencontre, much before she had a possibility of recognizing him through the mist aforesaid. A fear, a hope, a joy, a dread, one so woven with another there was no disentangling them, sprang up like a ray of light in Lady Marabout's heart--a possibility dawned in her: to be rejected as an impossibility? Lady Marabout crossed the ante-room, her heart throbbing tumultuously, spurred on to noble atonement and reckless self-sacrifice, if fate allowed them. She opened the drawing-room door; Flora Montolieu was alone. "Flora, you have seen Goodwood?" She turned, her own face as pale and her own eyes as dim as Lady Marabout's. "Yes." "You have refused him?" Flora Montolieu misconstrued her chaperone's eagerness, and answered haughtily enough: "I have told him that indifference would be too poor a return for his affections to insult him with it, and that I would not do him the injury of repaying his trust by falsehood and deception. I meant what I said to you last night; I said it on the spur of pain, indignation, no matter what; but I could not keep my word when the trial came." Lady Marabout bent down and kissed her, with a fervent gratitude that not a little bewildered the recipient. "My dear child! thank God! little as I thought to say so. Flora, tell me, you love some one else?" "Lady Marabout, you have no right----" "Yea, I have a right--the strongest right! Is not that other my son?" Flora Montolieu looked up, then dropped her head and burst into tears--tears that Lady Marabout soothed then, tears that Carruthers soothed, yet more effectually still, five minutes afterwards. * * * * *