‘I’m not a bad girl, Tim,’ Annie whispered, softly; ‘I’m not all unworthy of your goodness to me .... I thought I wouldn’t be able to speak to ye again; but I’m pleased to have seen ye this once, though everything is altered now .... Tim, I don’t belong here, only for this while of trouble .... but I’m glad I can wish ye good-bye before I go.’ She drew closer to him; he held her in his arms; for one instant their faces touched, both of them wet with tears; then, as if that embrace were some final leave-taking, he got up, mutely, and at once prepared to depart. At the door-way he paused, and looked back on her; she stood leaning against the mantel-piece, and smiled on him. That vision of her pale face, and of the smile in her dark eyes, remained in his mind as he went out into the night. But it was as the vision that accompanies the wanderer when he knows that to its reality he will not return again. Was that Annie’s thought as she sank back in her chair with a weary sigh as soon as she was left alone, leaving him to return to the Farm and its hospitable welcome, to Mrs Robson’s new mysteries, and Alice Robson’s saddened face?--was there mingled with the remembrance that she had tried to say farewell to her friend some feeling of separation and of loss? Perhaps, but at that time she was attempting to be strong, nerved by the new trial that she could not escape; for it was always her instinct, like that of others in her family, to meet trial with pride, if not with fortitude. She bound up her hair, and got the tea-things ready, before she sat down to wait for her mother and for Nat .... Tim had tried to be good to her; oh, he had tried to be good; if she never saw him again she would be grateful still .... The sense of the new danger, however, was more overwhelming when she awoke to the remembrance of it in the darkness of the night; and when, with the memory, there came shame, and pain, and fever as on those first nights after she had returned to her home. She tried to be still and to bear it, in the silence of her mother’s room where she was sleeping now; but the loneliness and misery were too much for her, and she broke out at last into suffocating cries. Jenny heard her, and was by her pillow in an instant; but, although she clung to her mother, she would not confess to her. ‘Oh, mother, it’s coming,’ she sobbed out in the darkness; ‘I know that it’s coming, and they all will know. They’ll make me a shame and a by-word in the place--I shall never be happy, whatever happens now. The Lord might have spared me, He might have helped me in my trouble; but I’ve been a bad girl, and He won’t give help to me.’