She looked up at him with a light in her beautiful eyes as she said these words, that made Beauchamp Chancellor feel strangely unlike his usual equable, comfortable self. Why did she trust him so? Why did she take things so deeply, so in earnest? Why was she not like the ninety-and-nine other girls he had flirted with, and thought pretty, and talked nonsense to, and left none the worse? He felt half provoked with her for being so different, yet a vague instinct whispered to him, that in this very difference lay her peculiar charm. There were no more tetes-a-tetes. It was getting dusk as they walked home, and they all kept together, and the conversation was general. Sydney wondered a little why Eugenia was so quiet, but supposed she must be suffering from some amount of reaction from her high spirits earlier in the day. Captain Chancellor bade them good-night at their own door. Sydney fancied his manner a little odd--more abrupt, less self-possessed than usual, when he shook hands with her. He did not call the next day, as she somehow half expected, nor the day after, and Eugenia did not seem surprised. She did not look well, Sydney fancied; and when urged by her sister to tell what was wrong, she confessed, to having felt over fatigued since Saturday's long walk. "She has many and many a time walked to Ayclough and back without being tired," thought Sydney. "There must be something wrong. Can they have quarrelled?" Possessed with this idea, she watched eagerly for Captain Chancellor's next appearance, and thought it doubly unlucky that Frank's absence from home for a day or two should have happened at this crisis, when through him she might have learnt something of what was the matter, and if anything lay within her power to do for her sister. To a superficial observer, poor Sydney, during these few days, would have looked the more anxious and unhappy of the two. It was as sad as strange to her to believe Eugenia in suffering, and to be in ignorance of the cause. On Thursday evening the sisters were sitting by themselves in the drawing-room, their father busy writing in his own little room, when there came a ring at the front door bell. Up jumped Sydney, her heart beating considerably faster than its wont, her face full of eagerness. "That must be Frank," observed Eugenia, quietly. For the time being, the sisters seemed to have changed characters. "Frank!" exclaimed Sydney; and though it was five days since she had seen her _fiance_, at the supposition, her face fell. "Oh, no, it can't be Frank! He was not to return till Friday--that's to-morrow."