“What! When some one is ready to sit in the dusk and hear you sing?” Barbara looked at her mother innocently enough. She was all meek guile that morning. “My Lord Gore is a good judge.” “Why, to be sure, he shall give you a lesson or two. We must get you some new songs pricked. The old ones are too chirrupy and out of date.” Thus my lady imagined that she had discovered much of the truth, and perhaps she had discovered some small portion of it beneath that placid surface. Dead flowers! Anne Purcell had no prophetic instinct in such matters. And Barbara was glad when she was gone, and the garden empty of all thought save the thought of expiation. She was neither happy nor sad, but possessed by a strange tranquillity, like the first sense of coming sleep to one who has been in pain. She might have been surprised at her own calmness had she been in a mood to be surprised at anything. It was as though bitterness and doubt had been swept out of her path, leaving the way easy toward the inevitable end. Barbara went into the music-room, and, lifting the lid of the harpsichord, let her fingers go idly to and fro over the notes. So few hours had passed, and yet the passionate voice of yesterday had died down to a distant whisper. She was glad, quietly glad now, that he had gone out of her life innocent and unharmed. There was still the blood-debt between them, and in the consummation of her purpose she would leave him a memory that could retain but little tenderness. It was a strange yet very natural mood, the mood of one going calmly to the scaffold with all the fears and yearnings of yesterday drugged into stoical sleep. Her one wonder was that she had been so blind, and that she should have overlooked the grim simplicity of the riddle of three years. Now, everything seemed as apparent and real to her as the reflection of her own face in the mirror upon the wall. Her whole insight had seized upon the discovery and accepted it with swift conviction, even as a man in doubt and trouble seizes on the text that answers his appeal. She could have laughed at her own blindness, had laughter been possible over such a hazard.