"This woman," thought she, "would be a formidable enemy. I wonder whether she might not also prove a valuable friend." Then, sharp and cold, shot through her the misgiving of the day before; what had she been doing at Blackgrove, this dark-eyed girl, and what did she know of Sir Henry Hallaton? No stone would she leave unturned till she found out. Miss Ross, however, did not seem at all a mysterious person, at least on the surface. Before she had taken off her bonnet and made friends with the pug, she had already broached the subject nearest the other's heart. "You are very kind to me, Mrs. Lascelles," she said, folding the pug's ears back with her white, well-shaped hands; "but I must not come into your house and waste your substance under false colours. Do I look like an adventurer, adventuress,--what do you call it?--a person who lives from hand to mouth, who has no settled abode,--a sort of decently-dressed vagrant, not exactly starving, but barely respectable? Because that's what I _am_!" Mrs. Lascelles stared, and called her dog away. "I went to Blackgrove as an adventuress," continued Miss Ross, in calm, placid tones, with no appearance of earnestness but in the firm lines round her mouth, "I left it as an adventuress. I can hold my own anywhere, and with any one; but I should have been worse than I am had I stayed a day longer in that house!" "Tell me about it!" exclaimed Mrs. Lascelles eagerly. "I am sure you are not--not--at all the sort of person I shouldn't like to know." "I _will_ tell you," said the other, speaking lower and faster now, with a bright gleam in her black eyes. "I haven't a friend in the world--I never _did_ have a woman friend; if I had--well, it's no use thinking of that now. Never mind; I'll tell you every thing, because--because I fancy I can guess something, and you ought to know. Have you ever seen Miss Hallaton, Helen Hallaton?--a girl with black eye-brows, and a face like an old Greek _bas-relief_. Well, I was to be Helen's companion;--does that surprise you? If you were a widower, Mrs. Lascelles, and had daughters, am I the sort of person you would engage as their companion?" It was a difficult question. From the widower's point of view, Mrs. Lascelles was not quite sure but she _would_. Miss Ross, however, went on without waiting for an answer.