Marjory stood stupefied in the centre of the little dim room, faintly lighted by its green windows. It seemed to her that she could neither move nor speak. Was it a dream? or was it possible? Could it be? All her old thoughts at the reading of Tom’s letter swept over her mind like a gust. If this was Isabell, then what was her real position? and what changes might be involved of which nobody had dreamed? Marjory’s heart began to flutter like the sick girl’s. A cloud of confusion seemed to float round her. She saw the others but dimly out of her hot excited eyes. Isabell--his wife! “God help us,” she stammered, not knowing what she said. “I don’t understand it--I don’t understand it! Whose wife?” Isabell raised her pathetic eyes, wondering and appealing, to her visitor’s face. Agnes looked at her steadily with an uncommunicating defiance. The one knew nothing of the confusion in Marjory’s mind, but only felt with a painful anguish such as sometimes rends the hearts of the dying, that this sympathy which she longed for, had failed her--the other knew, and confronted the lady who was her rival, daring her to avoid the revelation which was impending, but altogether unconscious and incapable of comprehending Marjory’s thoughts. Neither of them spoke. And in the moment everything that had happened during the last four months whirled through Marjory’s brain, passed before her eyes like a panorama. Poor Tom on his death-bed, playing with the something that he would and would not tell her--then in the last hurried scene of all believing he had told her, thanking God that he had done it. Oh! the pitifulness of that thanksgiving for a confession never made! Had he made it, where would this girl have been now? It might have been life to her instead of death, it might have saved the life of the old father who broke his heart for Tom. It might have--God knows what mazes of sudden fancy she plunged into;--then all in a moment, came back to find herself crouching down for support in her chair, holding by it, looking at Isabell’s pale alarmed face through a darkness that slowly dispersed. “What has happened?” she heard herself saying as she came out of the darkness. She had not fainted nor fallen; but a mist had come about her, parting her from reality, and engrossing her faculties at the very moment when the secret she had sought so long looked at her out of her companions’ eyes. As Isabell’s face, however, slowly appeared to her out of that mist, and she saw the intense expression of suffering and anxiety in it, the weakness, every blue vein showing, the large circle round those too luminous eyes, the wistful look in which her whole soul was--Marjory’s heart was touched so suddenly that one impulse swept all other feelings away.