It was very strange--now that she had Sydney all to herself comfortably--Sydney, as eager to hear, as ready to be sympathising as the most exacting narrator could demand, it seemed to Eugenia she had nothing to tell. At first the younger sister felt rather puzzled, but before long the mystery was explained--an accidental allusion to the hero of the evening by name, and Sydney understood the whole; understood it, young as she was, far better than Eugenia herself. The discovery by no means diminished her anxiety, the cause for which she, perhaps, a little exaggerated. She knew her sister's fitfulness and impressionability; she suspected, though but dimly, the unsounded depths beneath. Yet she made an almost unavoidable mistake in judging this vivid, complex, immature nature too much by her own. How could a girl of seventeen, wise though she might be for her years, have done otherwise? She kept her suspicions to herself, her misgivings also at first, but she did not altogether succeed in concealing her gravity. "What are you looking so gloomy about, Sydney?" said Eugenia. "I don't quite know. I can't exactly say why I feel so--not gloomy, Eugenia, but anxious," she replied. "I am not sure that I like that Captain Chancellor, however handsome and charming he is. I don't think it was _quite_ nice of him picking you out in that conspicuous way. It must have made people notice you." "_That_ would never trouble me," said Eugenia, loftily; but still the half-expressed doubt in her sister's words seemed to echo some hitherto unacknowledged instinct in herself. Sydney went on speaking-- "I have often felt a sort of vague dread of finding ourselves really grown-up, Eugenia. Papa _can't_ enter into things as a mother could, though he is so kind and gentle. We seem to be thrown so on our own resources. I don't, of course, mean so much with regard to myself;" here a faint tinge of pink crept over her face; "I am wonderfully, unusually fortunate; but that does not make my anxiety for your happiness the less; I wish we had a mother, Eugenia." "So do I," said the elder girl, wistfully. "Even if she had lived a few years with us it would have been different. But not even to be able to remember her! We can't expect papa to see that we are too much thrown upon ourselves, for he has never seen it otherwise. And, of course, Aunt Susan is less than no good. However, Sydney," she went on, in a different tone, "as far as regards this Captain Chancellor, whom, for some reason--I don't know what, I don't think you quite do yourself--you are so afraid of, you may set your mind at rest. I have been thinking very seriously to myself to-day. I thoroughly understand myself and the whole position of things, and I am very well able to take care of myself. I am not going to have my head turned so easily." Sydney smiled, and shook her head. "I hope not," she said. Eugenia grew more earnest.