“Oh, you don’t know what joy you give me. Yes, I will tell you everything: it has been so terrible bearing it alone,” cried Celia, holding on to her friend and weeping in wild relief. “I couldn’t tell you about his coming beforehand; he made me promise not to; he was more afraid, I think, of mother’s finding out about his being so worried and unhappy than of anything else. And afterwards I couldn’t tell you, because—because I was so afraid he must have done it. Oh, Evie, are you sure he didn’t?” “Darling, what made you even think for a moment he did?” “Because I left them together,” answered Celia in a low, terrified voice; “and father was in one of his rages and John white and cold.” “Well, he didn’t,” replied Evelyn. “I thought at first he did, by accident, of course, but he didn’t. So tell me everything from the beginning.” “It began about a month ago,” said Celia, “with Margaret getting ill: that was the final misfortune. I was away on a visit to the Williamsons then, you remember, so he could write without being afraid that his letters would be noticed—I have always managed to let him know when I’m away from here—and he told me how bad things were with him. Finally, he asked for my help; he had always refused to take a penny before—he has all mother’s pride, you know—but he couldn’t get the things Margaret needed if she was to have a chance of getting well, and that broke it down; nothing else would have. I was for sending him all I could scrape together, but a sudden, foolish desire to see me and talk to me came over him; he wrote as eagerly as a boy and made this plan. Father almost always went up early; it seemed so easy for me to slip down and open the drawing-room window and he could so easily get into the park and steal across the lawn. I didn’t much like it, but there was no other way in which I could see him without running the risk of father’s getting to hear of it—and when once it had been suggested, oh, Evie, I longed to see him as much as he did to see me.” “Yes, dear,” Evelyn said understandingly. “And what happened?”