Surely some fate guided her eyes, just at that moment, guided them to the small, half-opened note, lying at her elbow; a note so opened that the signature alone presented itself to her glance. “Your affectionate Lisbeth.” She gave a little start, and then flushed up with a queer agitation. “Lisbeth!” she said, “Lisbeth!” And then, with quite a self-reproach in her tone, “Oh, no! Not Lisbeth. How could I say it? Not Lisbeth!” She put out her hand and took up the note, protestingly. “I could not bear to think it,” she said. “It might be any one else, but not Lisbeth.” And yet the next minute a new thought forced itself upon her, a memory of some words of Lisbeth’s own. “We were nothing but a couple of children when we met at Pen’yllan,” that young lady had said, a few days before, a trifle cavalierly. “He was only three-and-twenty, and as for me, what was I but a child, a school-girl, not much more than sixteen.” “But,” protested Georgie, her eyes shining piteously, and the moisture forcing itself into them, “but it might not have been she; and if it was Lisbeth he loved, the story may have been exaggerated. Such stories always are; and if any part of it is true, she was so young, and did not know what she was doing. It was not half so wrong in Lisbeth as it would have been in me, who have had mamma all my life to teach me the difference between right and wrong. She had nobody but the Misses Tregarthyn; and people who are good are not always wise.” She was not very wise herself, poor, loving, little soul! At least she was not worldly wise. She could not bear the thought of connecting that cruel story with her most precious Lisbeth, in whom she had never yet found a fault. And if it must be connected with her, what excuses might there not be! Oh, she was so sure that it was an exaggerated story, and that, if the truth were known, Lisbeth’s fault had only risen out of Lisbeth’s youth and innocence. She was so disturbed about her friend, that it was quite a long time before she remembered that she had a quiet little pain of her own to contend with, only the ghost of a pain as yet, but a ghost which, but for this timely check, might have been very much harder to deal with than it was.