Barbara said nothing. What was the good of protestations? She would never utter a word against Reynold Harding--never. And what could she say about Adrian Scarlett? She had not owned to herself that she cared for him. If she did--and she was conscious of strong pulsations, which flushed her face, and filled her veins with tingling warmth--the more reason for silence. She laid a hand on the carved foliage of the post, and faced the dim figure propped in the bed. There was something grotesquely feeble about the little man's attitude. His face, discoloured and pale, drooped in the greenish shadow of the hangings, his unshaven chin rested on his breast, his parchment hands lay in a little nerveless heap on the counterpane before him. One would have said that he was set up in sport, as children set up dolls and nine-pins, on purpose to be knocked over. "Hadn't you better lie down?" said Barbara, after considering him for a while. She wanted to speak tenderly, for the sake of the strange new gladness which was throbbing at her heart; yet the facts of sickness and hopeless decay had never seemed so distasteful. When he assented, she put her arm about him with the utmost care, but she could hardly help shrinking from the clutch of his chilly fingers on her wrist. "Rothwells are a bad lot," he said, "bad and poor. Scarlett would be a better match. Some of his people have money." The habit of deference to her Uncle Hayes prevented her from resenting this speech. "Never mind about that, please, uncle," she said gently. "Good family, too," said Mr. Hayes, indistinctly to himself. "I did it for the best, as your mamma would see." "Never mind about mamma, Uncle Hayes," said the girl again. "I'm sure you had better rest a little." And when he acquiesced she went back to her novel, which was all about Adrian Scarlett. After all, he had not gone off without a thought of her--he had _not_ slighted her. Perhaps she was too young, and at any rate she could not be angry with her uncle since he had told her of Adrian's love. She had a right to think of him as Adrian, surely, if he loved her. So he had been sent away--where? Perhaps he would see somebody else, somebody better and more beautiful, and she would be forgotten. Well!--Barbara's eyes were fixed intently on the page--even if he did forget her, it might break her heart, but she need not be ashamed that she had thought of him, since she held the happy certainty that he had thought of her. Happen what might in his after life, he had loved her once--he had!--he had! And she had feared that he had only laughed at her, she had thought that he might be heartless--Oh how was it possible that she could have been so wickedly unjust! She deserved that he should never come back to her.