Ariadne did think on it in the hours after he had left her, her husband going on board at midnight in preparation for his departure at dawn. Think on it--ay! indeed she did--as also on his last kiss pressed to her lips before he left, and of many, many others he had given her as the hours flew by and evening turned into night. She thought on it each time she crept from her bed to the window of the lodgings he had taken for her, to see if yet the daybreak was at hand (though she knew well enough that it could not come for still some hours); if yet the ship that held her husband, her lover, was making ready to depart. And always by her side stood Anne, who had been bidden to come and sleep with Ariadne on this the first night of her desolation since she had been married; Anne, who had long since determined never to part from her mistress again. She had done it once when--in the exuberance of her youthful spirits, and proud of the possession of a good voice, which she knew how to manage in the _bravura_ style, as well as a considerable facility for dancing in a manner fitted to obtain popular applause--she had left her home at Fanshawe Manor to earn her own living in London as a public performer. But, alas! what had been the result? Her little sister who had gone with her as companion, after both had pleaded long and frequently to her mistress and their mother for permission to do so, had encountered ruin at the hands of a scoundrel, and death as the result of her shame; while, for herself, what had happened? What! A life destroyed through her impetuous determination to exact a terrible atonement from the villain who had done her sister to death; an existence destroyed and rendered barren, loveless, and blank, through her tempestuous desire for vengeance. She had left her mistress once; now she vowed often that never would she do it again. Never again. "I have indeed made myself an Iphigenia, as Sir Geoffrey calls me," she would say to Ariadne during the passage of those eight months, "by wandering from your and mother's side; but, no more. Henceforth I stay with you, if you will let me." And the two girls, who had never been parted since they were children, except for that year of a wild life on Anne's part in London: the two girls, of whom one had now become a happy wife, and the other a wife loathing and despising the man whom she had trepanned into marrying her--the man on whom, if chance came in her way, she would exercise still further vengeance--had kissed and embraced each other, and vowed that they would always remain together. For, although Anne called Ariadne her mistress, and was spoken of as the latter's maid and servant, they had from infancy been always more like sisters than aught else, and had grown up together loving each other fondly, while Anne's three extra years of age had made her like the elder and graver sister.