It was only six o'clock, and the two sisters were sitting together in the fire-lit twilight. Dinah was lying back in her easy-chair with her eyes closed, but Elizabeth had drawn her chair opposite the fire, and sat with her chin supported by her hands, gazing fixedly at the blazing logs with an absorbed gravity that again surprised Malcolm. When they heard the visitor announced they both started to their feet and came towards him, but it was Elizabeth who spoke first. "Mr. Herrick, this is too good of you. I hope--I trust," in an anxious tone, "that your news is also good." "You may rest assured of that," he returned, with an unconscious pressure of her hand. Dinah heaved a deep sigh of relief, and pointed silently to the chair that stood between them. She did not speak, perhaps because she could not: her face looked as though she had passed through an illness. Elizabeth, with her wonted quickness, answered Malcolm's unspoken question. "Dinah has had one of her bad sick headaches, and has only just come downstairs. All this sad business has upset her greatly, but you will be her best physician," with the old beaming smile which Malcolm dared not meet. "Now," with a housewifely air, "shall I give you some tea? You will dine with us, of course?" But Malcolm declined the offered refreshment. "I will dine with you if you wish it," he said rather formally, "and if you and Miss Templeton will excuse the absence of war-paint; but I am going back to town to-night." "Oh no, not to-night!" she exclaimed in quite a shocked voice; "you will be so tired." But Malcolm assured her with absolute truth that he had never been less tired in his life. The storm and stress and excitement of the day had acted on him like a tonic as well as an anodyne; in thinking and planning for others he had found relief from the intolerable ache of ever-present pain that had made his life so purgatorial of late, and the unhealed wound throbbed less cruelly. "I have so much to tell you that I think I had better begin at once," he observed in a business-like tone, and then both the sisters composed themselves to listen. But this time they heard him less calmly. The shock of learning Saul Jacobi's disgraceful plot, and Cedric's infatuation and weakness, was too much for Dinah, and she sobbed audibly. "Oh, Betty!" she exclaimed piteously, "to think that our dear boy should be deceiving us like this! But that woman has deluded him." "The woman beguiled me and I did eat," murmured Malcolm. Then Elizabeth looked at him rather sharply, as though she suspected a double meaning. But as he proceeded with his story, and she heard of Leah's noble act of self-sacrifice, her mood changed and her eyes filled with tears. Malcolm fancied that he heard her say softly under her breath, "She loved much, because much has been forgiven her."