“This is the most uncomfortable position a man could possibly be placed in,” Hugh told himself, as he breakfasted alone in the dining-room next morning, stared at by the painted eyes of the pictured effigies of bygone Pyms. “Why will she not see me?” for by Mrs. Mervyn’s message of excuse, that she would breakfast upstairs with Lilia, he augured that Lilia would not face him. “What am I to do?” he thought, pacing the room in gloomy discomfort. “Of course! I see it. I have been forced upon her. As a loving daughter, she was ready to sacrifice herself to please her dying father. If he had asked to be burnt like an Indian and she to lie down among the flames in suttee fashion, she would have carried out his whim. She shall not be made miserable for life. I must insist upon her accepting her release. Of course the Mervyns and lawyer Moffatt think it best that Sir Roderick’s ideas should be carried out. My duty plainly is, to fight for _her_ good, and hers only.” While he was hotly arguing against himself Lilia was hanging despairingly about Mrs. Mervyn in her darkened room. “My dear, I assure you he loves you, and would have wished to marry you even against your father’s wish,” Mrs. Mervyn was assuring the unhappy girl for the hundredth time. “If you only see him, you will be convinced that I am right. You will, indeed!” Then Lilia said, brokenly, that she could not. If he would only go away, she would write to him. “Let him take everything, and go,” she said for about the hundred-and-first time. “Life is over for me.” Then once more Mrs. Mervyn said, this time somewhat indignantly, for she was losing patience, that such a suggestion to Mr. Paull savoured of insult. “You are cowardly in your grief, Lilia,” she said, sharply. “At least tell the young man your ideas yourself, instead of saying them over and over again to poor me, who can do nothing.” Perhaps it was this speech which brought about the following:— Hugh, impatiently pacing the dining-room, did not hear the door open, and when once he suddenly turned round as he reached the hearthrug, he started back in alarm at finding himself confronted by a ghostly figure. It was Lilia, Magdalen-like, with her hair dishevelled and hanging about over her white dressing-gown, with her head drooping, her swollen eyelids cast down, her arms crossed under her loose sleeves. “Miss Pym!” he said. Then he placed a chair for her, and set a guard upon his emotions. She sat down on the edge of the chair as if she were on sufferance. Indeed, she felt as if nothing in the world was her own now, except her grief. “What can I do for you?” he said, as gently and tenderly as he could. “Anything, anything that you wish, I will try to do.” She glanced up, at this. “Will you—go?” she said, timidly. “And forget all about us—about him, and me? And I will write to you about everything.”