Across the hall, gasping for breath, and tossing restlessly from side to side in the pain of internal injuries, was a woman who would have taken as great an interest as any in the novel scene transpiring so close to her; but no one gave her a single thought, no one supposed that the humble servant, Rachel Dane, could have taken any interest in the event, much less have thrown a light on the dark mystery that had saddened several hopeful lives. Everything had been so closely guarded that little of it had come to her knowledge. Janetta had told her that Mr. Dawn’s daughter and her friends had come, that was all. The suffering woman had a lively interest to see Cinthia, whom she had nursed as a little child, and of whom her aunt had talked so much, but she knew that her curiosity must bide the proper time. A house-maid had come in just now, and said: “Janetta, you are wanted in Mr. Dawn’s room. I will stay here until you come back.” Janetta went as bidden, and stationed herself at the back of the arm-chair where her mistress was sitting, close to the bed. Then Everard Dawn exclaimed, clearly: “Paulina!” Mrs. Varian gave a convulsive start and looked fearfully at the speaker. His blue eyes met hers full with a commanding expression, as he continued: “Paulina, in meeting my daughter here on my dying bed she has demanded to know the details of the feud as she believes it, that shadowed so darkly the last three years of her young life. Once I would have died to shield her from such sorrow, but now she declares that certainty of sorrow is better than the pangs of suspense. She demands the truth. It is our bitter duty to yield to her desires.” A hushed murmur of surprise went around the group, and Cinthia buried her face on Madame Ray’s bosom. She had indeed pleaded with her father for the truth, and he had promised to gratify her wish, though she wondered why he added: “There was indeed a terrible reason why you could not marry Arthur, my dear child, and it would have killed you at first to know it, but now that you love another man, and are engaged to marry him, you will not mind so much.” They had startled her strangely, those words, and she hung tremblingly on every sentence that fell now from her father’s lips, and before she hid her pallid face she had seen Arthur draw his chair close to his mother’s side--the mother he loved so dearly still, though she had parted him so cruelly from his beautiful betrothed. Again Everard Dawn breathed through pallid, pain-drawn lips: “All I ask of you, Paulina, is that you shall tell your side of our marriage and divorce. I will follow with my version of the story.” The listeners could scarcely express outcries of surprise. Everard Dawn had revealed to them all in one brief sentence a totally unsuspected fact. Mrs. Varian, the wealthy, beautiful, haughty woman, was his divorced wife. Cinthia trembled with surprise, and clung closer to her loving friend, who thought quickly.