"Need you get nervous about that just now?" "I'm nervous about everything--I'm unsettled--Mattie, I have acted very treacherously to _him_." "To Mr. Sidney!--not to Mr. Sidney?" "Yes," was the answer. Mattie became excited. How had it occurred?--who had done it?--who had stolen her thoughts away from him? "I have been trying very hard to love him--sometimes I think I do love him better than the--the _other_--just for a while, when he is very happy sitting near me, and very full of the future, that can never, never come." "Go on please," said the curious Mattie. "Mattie, you remember Mr. Darcy?" she asked, spasmodically. "Mr. Darcy--no," said the puzzled Mattie. "The gentleman who--who fell in love with me when I was a child," she explained, very rapidly, and with still greater excitement, "whom I thought I had forgotten, and who had forgotten me, until I met him again." "Oh! this _is_ wrong!" exclaimed Mattie. "I know it--I have owned it!" cried Harriet; "let me tell the story out. I met him, parted coldly from him, met him again, all by accident on my part; met him for a third time at the Eveleighs, with whom he had got on visiting terms; met him day after day, evening after evening there, until the spell was on me which overpowered me, and robbed me of my peace--until I loved him, Mattie!" "And he knows----" "He knows nothing, save that I am engaged to be another's--and that I dare scarcely think of him." "He knows too much, _I_ know," said Mattie, reflectively; "and he has found a way to turn you against Mr. Sidney. What a wonder he must be!" "Poor Sidney!" "And to think it's all over between you and him," added Mattie--"him who thinks so much of you, and is growing old to my eyes, with the fear upon him which I understand now, and which is now so natural!" "What fear!" "Of losing you." "I am so sorry--_so_ very sorry for him. And I am ashamed to think that I have led him on to build his hopes upon me, and now must dash them down." "Yes--to-night," said Mattie, thoughtfully. "Tonight!" exclaimed Harriet, in alarm. "I don't know much about these things--I never understood what love for a young man was, having had too much to do," she added, with a little laugh that echoed strangely in that shadowy room, "but it don't seem quite the thing to keep the two on, or both of them in suspense about you." "Do you think I would?" asked Harriet, proudly. "It seems to me that if I were in your place, I should take a pattern from Mr. Sidney, and speak out at once--go straight at it, as he calls it--and tell him everything." "But----" Mattie became excited in her turn. "It isn't right--it isn't fair to let a man keep thinking of you, when you've turned against him," she cried; "it's cowardly and base to hide the truth from him, or be afraid of telling it. It won't kill him, Harriet, for he's a proud spirit, that will bear up through it all, bitterly as he will feel it for a while."