"No! no!" he said with some peremptoriness. "Your cousin insulted you by daring to drive with you in such a state. That is all that matters to me--or should, I think, matter to you. Will you have your candle, and shall I call anyone?" She shook her head and moved towards the staircase, he accompanying her. When he saw how feebly she walked, he was on the point of asking her to take his arm and let him help her to her room; but he refrained. At the foot of the stairs she paused. Her "good-night" died in her throat as she offered her hand. Her dejection, her girlish shame, made her inexpressibly attractive to him; it was the first time he had ever seen her with all her arms thrown down. But he said nothing. He bade her good-night with a cheerful courtesy, and, returning to the hall fire, he stood beside it till he heard the distant shutting of her door. Then he sank back into his chair and sat motionless, with knitted brows, for nearly an hour, staring into the caverns of the fire. CHAPTER II Laura awoke very early the following morning, but though the sun was bright outside, it brought no gaiety to her. The night before she had hurried her undressing, that she might bury herself in her pillow as quickly as possible, and force sleep to come to her. It was her natural instinct in the face of pain or humiliation. To escape from it by any summary method was always her first thought. "I will, I must go to sleep!" she had said to herself, in a miserable fury with herself and fate; and by the help of an intense exhaustion sleep came. But in the morning she could do herself no more violence. Memory took its course, and a very disquieting course it was. She sat up in bed, with her hands round her knees, thinking not only of all the wretched and untoward incidents connected with the ball, but of the whole three weeks that had gone before it. What had she been doing, how had she been behaving, that this odious youth should have dared to treat her in such a way?