Alice was very unhappy in consequence. What was the cause of this estrangement--had she offended her, and how? But Una had never before borne resentment for an hour. What could have altered her entire nature so? Could it be the shadow and chill of coming insanity? Once or twice, when her sister urged her with tears and entreaties to disclose the secret of her changed spirits and demeanour, she seemed to listen with a sort of silent wonder and suspicion, and then she looked for a moment full upon her, and seemed on the very point of revealing all. But the earnest dilated gaze stole downward to the floor, and subsided into an odd wily smile, and she began to whisper to herself, and the smile and the whisper were both a mystery to Alice. She and Alice slept in the same bedroom--a chamber in a projecting tower--which on their arrival, when poor Una was so merry, they had hung round with old tapestry, and decorated fantastically according to their skill and frolic. One night, as they went to bed, Una said, as if speaking to herself---- "'Tis my last night in this room--I shall sleep no more with Alice." "And what has poor Alice done, Una, to deserve your strange unkindness?" Una looked on her curiously, and half frightened, and then the odd smile stole over her face like a gleam of moonlight. "My poor Alice, what have you to do with it?" she whispered. "And why do you talk of sleeping no more with me?" said Alice. "Why? Alice dear--no why--no reason--only a knowledge that it must be so, or Una will die." "Die, Una darling!--what can you mean?" "Yes, sweet Alice, die, indeed. We must all die some time, you know, or--or undergo a change; and my time is near--_very_ near--unless I sleep apart from you." "Indeed, Una, sweetheart, I think you _are_ ill, but not near death." "Una knows what you think, wise Alice--but she's not mad--on the contrary, she's wiser than other folks." "She's sadder and stranger too," said Alice, tenderly. "Knowledge is sorrow," answered Una, and she looked across the room through her golden hair which she was combing--and through the window, beyond which lay the tops of the great trees, and the still foliage of the glen in the misty moonlight. "'Tis enough, Alice dear; it must be so. The bed must move hence, or Una's bed will be low enough ere long. See, it shan't be far though, only into that small room." She pointed to an inner room or closet opening from that in which they lay. The walls of the building were hugely thick, and there were double doors of oak between the chambers, and Alice thought, with a sigh, how completely separated they were going to be. However she offered no opposition. The change was made, and the girls for the first time since childhood lay in separate chambers. A few nights afterwards Alice awoke late in the night from a dreadful dream, in which the sinister figure which she and her father had encountered in their ramble round the castle walls, bore a principal part.