Of course it _is_ Miss Prince--Miss Prince come to surprise Lavinia in her utter dishevelment of soul, though the habit of a lifetime keeps her unnerved body in its simple raiment neat and dainty--come to verify the staring facts that sleep has mocked her; that hope has bid her an eternal good-bye; that her despair is beyond the depth that any leaded line can plumb; that she is wretched and guilty beyond the sin-and-sorrow compass of any woful malefactor since the world began; come to spy and comment, before she has begun to make up spirit and flesh for that ghastly play-acting which is to last her life. These are the thoughts--if such mental _orts_ and fragments can be called so--that knock against each other in a vertigo of fear in Miss Carew’s brain, as her visitor, with a graceful flitting gait that has yet sufficiently proved the determination beneath it, floats up the kitchen-garden walk, that had yesterday witnessed poor Mrs. Darcy’s discomfiture. Féodorovona is dressed in a delicate Court mourning, and a certain elevation of expression tells Lavinia that she has come to proclaim some action on her own part that to most persons it would appear more judicious to conceal. “Gathering flowers?” she says, with a chastened smile, and with no attempted apology for overriding her listener’s efforts to elude her. “If I had only thought of it, I would have brought you any number from our Houses.” There is a touch of the comfortable maternal brag in the words, but it appears only to vanish as she adds with a quiet sigh, “As you may imagine, I had other things to think of!” “Had you?” Lavinia has scarcely interrupted her flower-cutting, since it enables her to present only a profile to her visitor’s observation, and the reflection is passing through her mind with a foggy comfort that, since she has not shed one tear, there can be no swollen eyelids to give her away, and that, even if there were, Féodorovna’s panoply of perfect egotism would protect her from the sight of them. “_Had_ I?” repeats Miss Prince, the suavity of her high sorrow touched by a ruffle of indignation. “Who can know that better than you?” The shape of the question gives Lavinia an inward convulsion of new terror. Is it possible that she can have heard, or learnt, or divined? “Do you mean that Captain Binning is gone?” she asks, bending over a long-stalked bronze tulip, which she snips off nearer the bulb than she would have done in a more rational moment. “Yes; he is gone!” After a moment of reverent ruminating, “It went off quite quietly.” “Did it?” “Our real farewell was yesterday. We had a very important interview yesterday morning. I asked for it.” “Did you?” “As you know, I have never been tied by the conventions. I have always overridden them.” “Yes.”