“You had better stay here for a few minutes--till I am well away,” says Lavinia, speaking very fast, but not incoherently. After a little gasping pause, with a fresh rush of utter horror and woe, “Must I tell Rupert?” Then, giving herself that answer of which her lover is quite incapable, “No! I must not! if I did, it would be in the hope--the certainty that he would cast me off. No, no; I must not--I must not tell him, whatever happens: it would never do to tell him.” She rambles on, half to herself, repeating the phrases, as of one whose hold on her own intelligence is slipping away; then recovering it with a sudden snatch, she says brusquely, “Well! it is done, and it can’t be undone, and there is an end of it. Good-bye! I--I would say ‘God bless you’ if I had any business to.” Without giving him time for any answering benediction--as, indeed, why should he bless her?--she breaks into a stumbling run, which carries her blindly on, till at the curve which will finally hide him from her sight, the curve whose distance from him guarantees her safety, the dully raging passion within her arrests her feet, and turns her head to see once more in crowning farewell torment the figure, in loosely hanging clothes, of him whom she has ironically helped back to life only to make him taste the sharpness of death. * * * * * “But I told you to say that I was not at home to any one?” “I did say so, ’m.” “It is not eleven o’clock yet?” “No, ’m; it wants five minutes of eleven.” “I am too busy: I have too much to do. It is impossible that I should see any one this morning.” “So I told Miss Prince, ’m; but she said she was sure that you would see her.” “Miss Prince always says that.” “Yes, ’m.” There is sympathy in the assent of the elderly unsmart butler, who has reached the third stage in the usual progress of valuable servants to their goal--that progress marked by the successive milestones of “servant,” “treasure,” “tyrant,” “pensioner;” for Féodorovna is not popular with his class. “Will you go back and tell Miss Prince that I am very sorry, but I am afraid I must ask her to put off her call till to-morrow, as Sir George and Mr. Rupert are coming down by the 4.38 train, and I have a good many arrangements to make before they arrive?” The old butler regards her with a respectful pity for the weakness of reasoning power that can imagine the visitor in question to be kept at bay by the means proposed. “Yes, ’m; but I do not think it will be any use, for Miss Prince said she would like to take a turn in the garden until you were disengaged. And I beg your pardon, ’m--your eyes are better than mine--isn’t that Miss Prince opening the iron gate?”