And yet it was necessary to do something, for who could tell but that her husband might come to this station in search of her? Mairi's anxiety, too, was increasing every moment, insomuch that she was fairly trembling with excitement and fatigue. Sheila resolved that she would go down and throw herself on the tender mercies of that terrible old lady in Kensington Gore. For one thing, she instinctively sought the help of a woman in her present plight; and perhaps this harshly-spoken old lady would be gentle to her when all her story was told. Another thing that prompted this decision was a sort of secret wish to identify herself even yet with her husband's family--to prove to herself, as it were, that they had not cast her off as being unworthy of him. Nothing was farther from her mind at this moment than any desire to pave the way for reconciliation and reunion with her husband. Her whole anxiety was to get away from him, to put an end to a state of things which she had found to be more than she could bear. And yet, if she had had friends in London called respectively Mackenzie and Lavender, and if she had been equally intimate with both, she would at this moment have preferred to go for help to those bearing the name of Lavender. There was doubtless something strangely inconsistent in this instinct of wifely loyalty and duty in a woman who had just voluntarily left her husband's house. Lavender had desired her not to hold communication with Edward Ingram: even now she would respect his wish. Lavender would prefer that she should, in any great extremity, go to his aunt for assistance and counsel; and to his aunt, despite her own dislike of the woman, she would go. At this moment, when Sheila's proud spirit had risen up in revolt against a system of treatment that had become insufferable to her, when she had been forced to leave her home and incur the contemptuous compassion of friends and acquaintances, if Edward Ingram himself had happened to meet her, and had begun to say hard things of Lavender, she would have sharply recalled him to a sense of the discretion that one must use in speaking to a wife of her husband. The two homeless girls got into another cab, and were driven down to Kensington Gore. Sheila asked if she could see Mrs. Lavender. She knew that the old lady had had another bad fit, but she was supposed to be recovering rapidly. Mrs. Lavender would see her in her bedroom, and so Sheila went up. The girl could not speak. "Yes, I see it--something wrong about that precious husband of yours," said the old lady, watching her keenly. "I expected it. Go on. What is the matter?" "I have left him," Sheila said with her face very pale, but no sign of emotion about the firm lips. "Oh, good gracious, child! Left him? How many people know it?" "No one but yourself and a young Highland girl who has come up to see me." "You came to me first of all?" "Yes." "Have you no other friends to go to?"