The expression was a curious one. “Very uneasy;” “dreadfully alarmed,” or some such phrase, would have seemed more suited to the circumstances. Margaret Copley felt puzzled. After all there was something very peculiar about Marion Baldwin; she could not make her out. There she sat staring into the fire, pale but perfectly calm. Not a tear, not a symptom of nervousness; only saying in that quiet, deliberate way that she was “very unhappy.” Margaret was too young, too inexperienced, and too practically ignorant of sorrow to detect the undertone of anguish, of bitter, remorseful misery in the few cold words—“I am very unhappy.” Marion said no more, and Margaret did not disturb her. At last the dinner gong sounded. Marion started: she had not changed her dress. “Never mind,” said Margaret, “come down as you are. Unless you would prefer staying up here.” “Oh, no,” said Marion, “I shall dress very quickly. I shall be ready in five minutes.” She had a morbid horror of appearing affected or exaggerated; and an instinctive determination to keep her feelings to herself. Naturally, she made the mistake of overdoing her part. She dressed quickly, went downstairs and sat through the long, weary dinner; to all appearance the calmest and least uneasy of the party. One after another of the grooms and gardeners, despatched with lanterns in various directions to seek the truant, returned after a fruitless search. The Squire grew more and more fidgety. Lady Anne was all but in tears—Margaret and Georgie unable to eat any dinner. Marion seemed to herself to be standing on the edge of a fearful precipice, down which she dared not look; but she said nothing, and no stranger entering the company would have imagined that she, of all the party, was the one most chiefly concerned in the fate of Geoffrey Baldwin. Dinner over, the ladies mechanically adjourned as usual to the drawing-room. Lady Anne and Margaret sat together by the fire, talking in a low voice. Marion stayed near them for a moment, but Lady Anne’s sort of sick-room tone and half-pitying glances in her direction, irritated her. So she got a book, and seated herself by a little reading-table in the further corner of the room. Georgie ran in and out: every five minutes braving the cold and fog at the hall-door to peep out to see, or hear rather, “if any one was coming,” like sister Anne in the grim old story. For more than half-an-hour they sat thus in almost unbroken silence. The Squire and Captain Ferndale, with the usual manly horror of an impending “scene,” lingered longer than usual in the dining-room. Suddenly Georgie darting back from one of her voyages of discovery to the hall-door, flew into the drawing-room exclaiming excitedly. “Mamma, Maggie, I hear a horse!” In an instant they all jumped up, and followed her into the hall. The door was wide open, the horse’s feet were heard plainly, steadily approaching, nearer and nearer.