Connie hesitated. Down a side street she perceived the stately front of Marmion, and at the same moment a tall man emerging from the dusk crossed the street and entered the Marmion gate. Her heart leapt. No! Absurd! He and Otto had not arrived yet. But already the Oxford dark, and the beautiful Oxford distances were peopled for her with visions and prophecies of hope. The old and famous city, that had seen so much youth bloom and pass, spoke magic things to her with its wise, friendly voice. Aloud, she said— “You haven’t heard? Mr. Falloden’s going to live with him.” Nora stopped in stupefaction. “_What?_” Connie repeated the information—adding— “I dare say Mr. Sorell didn’t speak of it to you, because—he hates it.” “I suppose it’s just a theatrical _coup_,” said Nora, passionately, as they walked on—“to impress the public.” “It isn’t!—it isn’t anything of the kind. And Otto had only to say no.” “It’s ridiculous!—preposterous! They’ll clash all day long.” Connie replied with difficulty, as though she had so pondered and discussed this matter with herself that every opinion about it seemed equally reasonable. “I don’t think so. Otto wishes it.” “But why—but _why_?” insisted Nora. “Oh, Connie!—as if Douglas Falloden could look after anybody but himself!” Then she repented a little. Connie smiled, rather coldly. “He looked after his father,” she said quietly. “I told you all that in my letters. And you forget how it was—that he and Otto came across each other again.” Nora warmly declared that she had not forgotten it, but that it did not seem to her to have anything to do with the extraordinary proposal that the man more responsible than any one else for the maiming—possibly for the death—of Otto Radowitz, if all one heard about him were true, should be now installed as his companion and guardian during these critical months. She talked with obvious and rather angry common sense, as one who had not passed her eighteenth birthday for nothing. But Connie fell silent. She would not discuss it, and Nora was obliged to let the subject drop. Mrs. Hooper, whose pinched face had grown visibly older, received her husband’s niece with an evident wish to be kind. Alice, too, was almost affectionate, and Uncle Ewen came hurrying out of his study to greet her. But Connie had not been an hour in the house before she had perceived that everybody in it was preoccupied and unhappy; unless, indeed, it were Alice, who had evidently private thoughts of her own, which, to a certain extent, released her from the family worries. What was the matter? She was determined to know. It happened that she and Alice went up to bed together. Nora had been closeted with her father in the little schoolroom on the ground floor, since nine o’clock, and when Connie proposed to look in and wish them good night, Alice said uncomfortably— “Better not. They’re—they’re very busy.” Connie ruminated. At the top of the stairs, she turned—