"I know it all," said Lucy in a sympathising tone. "Raymond told me he was engaged to my poor cousin." For Lady Raymond having adopted Mrs. Fitzpatrick to that degree of relationship, extended the kindred to her lost daughter. Mrs. Fitzpatrick was truth itself; there was no occasion to enter into detail; but she could not avoid correcting an erroneous statement of facts. "He is a very intimate and tried friend of mine," she said; "but he was not engaged, nor even attached to my daughter in the common sense of the word. He did not form our acquaintance until after Aveline had too clearly shown a tendency to the complaint which destroyed her. There could have been no thought of marriage between them; but being in my neighbourhood, during the latter part of her illness, he paid me such frequent visits, that, had there been any gossip in that solitary place, I dare say it would have ascribed such a reason for his conduct. I am sure he was like a son to me, at a time when I was deeply in need of support. And it is possible that under other circumstances, if his heart was disengaged, of which I am entirely ignorant, the regard and respect that he felt for my daughter might have ripened into a permanent attachment." "Of course it would; it is just the same thing. How melancholy!" said Lucy, with the usual amount of pity in her voice. "And so after all, my dear Mrs. Fitzpatrick, you are to be the future mistress of Tynebrook." "Do be reasonable, my dear Lady Raymond," said Mrs. Fitzpatrick, laughing. "I have always heard it considered hazardous for ladies to think of single men as their brothers: but I never heard that the same danger existed when they looked upon them as sons." The prints fell from Margaret's hands. She sat listening--breathless--with parted lips, and eyes fixed, to every word that Mrs. Fitzpatrick uttered. At first she could not think; she seemed turned to stone. Her next feeling was a sense of oppression, which made her find the crowded room intolerable. She looked cautiously round, and seeing every one engaged in their own pursuits, she made her escape through one of the open windows into the shrubbery. And all this she might have known easily before. She must often have been within a hair's breadth of knowing, when anything moved Mrs. Fitzpatrick to some distant allusion to her daughter. And two years had passed, during which she had been guilty of such injustice, such baseness; for had she loved nobly, would she have believed appearances against him? She, who was so slow to believe evil of the most casual acquaintance. All her sorrow, all her agony had been nothing to this corroding sense of shame to which she was now delivered.