Hardly a week had a yet elapsed since Ralph left, but already she was “wearying” for his return, her heart alternately dancing with sweetest hopes and trembling with misgivings. But she would leave it all to him. Who so wise, so brave, so true? What lay within human possibility to do, he would, she felt sure, set himself to achieve. The exact, nature of the complications about him, the fetters he had himself told her of, she did not just now much trouble her head about. Vaguely, she imagined them to be connected with Florence Vyse, though what, if this were the case, could be the special object of a journey to London, she was at a loss to think. But he had judged it best not at present to tell her, and she was content to wait for his own explanation—to be followed, alas! by what she could not bear to contemplate, the confession of the long deception she had herself practised. She had left home this morning, as usual, early, before the arrival of the letters, which to-day Cissy was looking for anxiously, the Indian mail being due. When she entered the little drawing-room, she was surprised at not finding her cousin there. Nor were there about, the room the usual traces of Mrs. Archer’s recent presence. “I hope Cissy is not ill,” thought she anxiously, as she hastened to Mrs. Archer’s bedroom. The door was shut, but “come in,” in Cissy’s voice reassured her. On entering the room, however, she stood aghast at the sight before her. There was Cissy on her knees before a huge trunk, two or three others of varying dimensions standing with their lids open in a row, while every article of furniture in the room, bed, tables, chairs, and floor itself, were literally heaped with the whole of the little lady’s wardrobe. Dresses, cloaks, shawls, bonnets, boots and linen—the whole of Mrs. Archer’s possessions seemed suddenly to have been seized with a frenzy of disorder, while she herself in their midst, her small person almost, hidden by the overwhelming portmanteau, looked utterly unable to cope with the chaotic confusion around her. The scene reminded Marion of the old fairy story of the poor little princess, shut up for twenty-four hours in a room of tangled threads, all of which by the expiration of the allotted time, she was ordered, under pain of some tremendous punishment, to wind with perfect regularity in even skeins for the use of her tormentor. “What are you about, Cissy?” ejaculated her cousin, “Have you lost anything, have you quarrelled with Madame Poulin and determined to leave her house on the spot?” “Don’t laugh, May, don’t,” said Cissy, beseechingly, looking up as she spoke. Though the request was unnecessary, as the sight of her tear-stained face quickly divested her cousin of any risible inclination. “I have had a letter from India—from George. At least part of it is from him; the rest from his doctor, he could not write much himself.”