“O that spectre! For three years it followed me up and down the dark staircase, or stood by my bed: only the blessed light had power to exorcise it.” A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. MRS. JAMESON. “That way madness lies.” KING LEAR. IT was quite true. She had not misunderstood what he said. Sir Ralph, for reasons best known to himself, left Altes the next day for an indefinite time. It seemed to Marion that there had been something prophetic in his calling her “brave and patient.” She needed, at this time, to be both. And she succeeded, poor child, in her endeavour to act up to his opinion of her. Day after day the appointed hour saw her in the schoolroom, doing her very best with her pupils, bearing with Lotty’s tempers and poor little Sybil’s moods. And no one, not even Cissy, suspected that she had even these to bear, far less the deeper, though hardly even to herself acknowledged sorrow—disappointment—call it which you will, the magnitude of which unconsciously swallowed up the lesser daily irritations. It was not merely a sorrow, a loss, a something gone out of her life, which she had not known was there till she missed it. It was more than these. She was mortified, ashamed of having given her regard, she would call it by no more tender name even to herself, unasked. For Ralph’s strange words and manner she, in her morbid self-reproach, now explained as entirely traceable to his generous pity for her. Pity, in the first place, for her dependent position, and secondly (ah, how it wounded her to think so!) for her unmaidenly, because unsought and unreturned, revelation of her “regard” for him. How extraordinarily people misunderstand each other! Thus she was thinking and suffering, at the very time that Ralph was repeating to himself over and over again, “Under no possible circumstances, had there been no shadow of a rival in the field, could that bright, sweet being have learnt to care for a soured, dried-up, in every way unattractive man like me!” At this period, I think, could Marion have been assured that such were Ralph’s feelings for her, she would have looked upon permanent separation from him as a comparatively small trial. For mortification, self-abasement of this kind are very hard upon a sensitive, pure-minded girl. “If only I could think he did not despise me,” she said to herself. It never occurred to her that so far, as least, as Ralph himself was concerned, her being a governess might have in any way have influenced him. She was too unpractical to realize the possibility of this; or was it, perhaps, the instinctive trust one genuine, noble nature feels in a kindred spirit? For Marion had been quick to perceive Mr. Erbenfeld’s contempt and Miss Vyse’s condescending insolence.