The evening came to its quiet end at last. Christabel had scarcely left her piano in the dim little third room--she had sat there in the faint light, playing slow sleepy nocturnes and lieder, and musing, musing sadly, with a faint sick dread of coming sorrow. She had seen it in her aunt's face. When the old buhl clock chimed the half-hour after ten the Major got up and took his leave, bending over Mrs. Tregonell as he pressed her hand at parting to murmur: "Remember," with an accent as solemn as Charles the Martyr's when he spoke to Juxon. Mrs. Tregonell answered never a word. She had been pondering and wavering all the evening, but had come to no fixed conclusion. She bade the two girls good-night directly the Major was gone. She told herself that she had the long tranquil night before her for the resolution of her doubts. She would sleep upon this vexed question. But before she had been ten minutes in her room there came a gentle knock at the door, and Christabel stole softly to her side. "Auntie, dear, I want to talk to you before you go to bed, if you are not very tired. May Dormer go for a little while?" Dormer, gravest and most discreet of handmaids, whose name seemed to have been made on purpose for her, looked at her mistress, and receiving a little nod, took up her work and crept away. Dormer was never seen without her needlework. She complained that there was so little to do for Mrs. Tregonell that unless she had plenty of plain sewing she must expire for want of occupation, having long outlived such frivolity as sweethearts and afternoons out. When Dormer was gone, Christabel came to her aunt's chair, and knelt down beside it just as she had done at Mount Royal, when she told her of Angus Hamleigh's offer. "Aunt Diana, what has happened, what is wrong?" she asked, coming at the heart of the question at once. There was no shadow of doubt in her mind that something was sorely amiss. "How do you know that there is anything wrong?" "I have known it ever since that horrible old woman--Medusa in a bonnet all over flowers--pansies instead of snakes--talked about Cupid and Psyche. And you knew it, and made her stop to tell you all about it. There is some cruel mystery--something that involves my fate with that of the actress I saw the other night." Mrs. Tregonell sat with her hands tightly clasped, her brows bent. She felt herself taken by storm, as it were, surprised into decision before she had time to make up her mind. "Since you know so much, perhaps you had better know all," she said, gloomily; and then she told the story, shaping it as delicately as she could for a girl's ear.