He still kept his gaze ahead as he continued, in detached sentences: “I never sympathized enough with Alan. I let him fight alone too long. I criticised when I should have carried him. There is no torture like that unavailing regret. Yesterday is dead, and repining is weakness. The only atonement I can make is to look on each individual need that presents itself before me, and ask myself what I would do now if that need was Alan’s.” Mrs. Nixon was silent; her folded hands tightened. She was beholding an unsuspected wound, hidden always beneath her brother’s imperturbable exterior; and the apparition held her tongue-tied. They both kept silence while the shadow crept along the veranda rail. At last Mr. Derwent spoke again in his ordinary manner, and with deliberation. “I have had some such thought as you suspect concerning Helen Maynard.” “Is the girl friendless? Where has she been living?” returned Mrs. Nixon defensively, conscious that when this subdued moment had passed, she should find a hundred embarrassments in the prospect of housing her brother’s stenographer. “She has been living in a boarding-house. She has grandparents on a farm in the country.” Mrs. Nixon maintained an ominous silence. Her brother changed his position, and an odd look of amusement grew in his averted eyes. “I have made up my mind to tell you what has been a secret up to now, Marion.” This quiet sentence sent a stream of color over his companion’s face; evidence of a shock that sent a wild throng of thoughts careering through her brain. Horrors! What was coming now? Her brother, whose fortune, as everybody knew, was to go to Robert; her brother, whose affliction made him averse to society! Could such a thing be as that this very narrowing of his social life had thrown him back on the society and sympathy of the neat, well-groomed girl, who was his right hand at the office. Why, of course! and Mrs. Nixon called herself imbecile for never having feared it. She reproached herself wildly for not having provided better for his recreation. More card-parties, more reading aloud; more sympathy in the travel-lectures he enjoyed. Oh, fool that she had been! Probably he had escorted Miss Maynard to those very lectures, and she had elucidated the pictures. It took but a moment of time for all these considerations to tear across Mrs. Nixon’s mind, and he added:— “I think it is time now to speak of it.” With haunting visions of card-games never played, she responded unsteadily:— “Pray do.” Mr. Derwent pressed his finger-tips lightly together. “Before I engaged Helen,” he began, “she had engaged me.” Mrs. Nixon leaned back in her chair under pressure of faintness.