These were serious and pressing enough already, Heaven help her! and yet, urgent and perilous as they were, it was not of them that she first thought when she found herself once more in her own room. There are no circumstances, however tremendous, which have power to quench the susceptibilities of women: their feelings must have way, no matter how dangerous the indulgence in them, how immediate the necessity for action. The meshes of a net which threatened destruction to herself and all that were dear to her were closing in around Lady Lisgard, and, calm as she looked, she knew it well--well as the wily salmon that poises motionless, and seemingly unconscious of his peril, in the red pool, below which the fisherman has set the spreading snare; but my Lady turns her back for a little upon the tide of woes that is setting in upon her--a spring-tide that may reach Heaven knows how far--and seeks the inland Past. It is the last time that she will ever visit it, and therefore she cannot choose but linger there a while, and shed some bitter tears. Her door is locked, for none must see her wishing “Good-bye,” and the windows are wide open to the air, which blows the flame of her reading-lamp hither and thither. She needs air, poor lady. A waft of wind that has swept some snowy steppe would have been grateful to her throbbing brow that April night; and as for light, a very little is enough for her purpose. Those few old letters she is reading, taken from a secret drawer in my Lady's desk, are as familiar to her as her prayers, and she seems to hold them almost as sacred. Yet one is not even a letter, but only a piece of folded note-paper, torn at the creases, and yellow--nay, yellower than mere age could possibly have turned it. It has been damaged by seawater. Within it are two locks of hair, quite white, and a few words in faded ink, _Frank Meade_ and _Rachel Meade_, with a date of five-and-thirty years ago.