This house was full of ghosts.... Perhaps Roddy’s father had slept in this room as a small boy. He had grown up here and then shaken the dust of his home from his feet and gone away and begotten Roddy.... Charlie must have looked like the beautiful wild sister, and that was why the grandmother had given him all that anxious and painful love. The sister had given birth to Mariella, and then run away and led God knows what sort of life. Poor Mariella! She had never had the sun on her: she had lived from birth--perhaps before birth--in the shadow cast by her bright mother; and when she grew up she had not emerged from it. That was the truth about Mariella. The family portraits were in the dining-room. To-morrow she would see them, study and compare.... It was madness to have come to this haunted house. Oh, Roddy! She could not live without him. He must, he must come back and take her for a year--a month even. Perhaps he had found out by now that he did love her after all, and was too proud to write and confess it. Martin had said it was agony to him to answer even an invitation. She must write to him again, give him an opening. Where was he now? If she could be transported to him now, this minute, she could make him succumb utterly to loving her. She would think of such ways of delighting him with caresses that he would never be able to do without her again.... It was sheer stupidity to go on enduring this agony when it only needed a trifling effort to end it all. For instance, if you leaned a little further out of the window.... But one did not commit suicide in other people’s houses: that was the ultimate error of taste. And then, poor Martin’s feelings at the inquest! ‘_Mr. Martin Fyfe, who was overcome with emotion several times, stated that a few hours previously deceased had declared her willingness to become his wife. This avowal, made on her own initiative, had met with ample response on his side, and there seemed every cause for joy and congratulation. The coroner in returning a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind observed that this reversal of the customary procedure in betrothals was but another example of the lack of self-control so deplorably frequent in the young woman of to-day, and seemed to him sufficient in itself to suggest a distinct lack of mental balance in deceased. He tendered his sincerest sympathy to Mr. Fyfe and absolved him from all blame._’ And Roddy might depart from his habits and inclinations once again, and write Martin a letter of condolence. No, no. She was going to show him she did not care, was not weeping for him: she was going to announce her engagement to Martin before long. There would be a paragraph in ‘The Times,’ congratulations, letters to write--(_I am a very lucky girl_)--a pretty ring--and almost certainly photographs in the illustrated weeklies.