"What would he think of me now?" Humbled as she was by the treatment she had received, and agitated by her position, Helen Perowne had enough of the old nature left to suffer terribly upon every question relating to her personal appearance. It was a dreadful shock to find that she had been completely transformed, as it were, into a woman of the country--one of those upon whom she had been accustomed to look with such disdain; but the shock was surpassed by the sensation of misery to find that her self-worshipped beauty was gone, as it were, for ever. Her greatest enemy could not have inflicted upon her a more cruel pang; and one constantly-recurring question kept repeating itself: "What would he say to me now?"--_he_; and it was not of Captain Hilton, her father, or any of her rejected lovers that she thought, but always of the Resident. What would Neil Harley think of her if he could see her distorted features? He could not recognise her, of that she felt sure, and in her agony of mind a complete change took place in her feelings. But an hour ago she had watched window and door, listened to every sound, however slight, and interpreted it to mean the coming of help--of Neil Harley and her father to fetch her away. But how could she wish for them to come now? Why should she be taken away? Instead of Helen Perowne, the beauty of the station, they would find, and would not recognise, a swarthy native woman, whose aspect would repel them, and they would be ready to doubt her word should she assert who she was. She was ready to pray now that no help might come--even that she might die. The women stole softly away, whispering to each other that she would soon come round; and as the suffering girl crouched there in her abasement her anguish did not grow less poignant, and she found herself, in spite of the repugnance she felt at the idea of being seen, somehow looking once more to Neil Harley for help. She recalled how she had laughed at his pretensions, even to treating them with indignity, and turning upon him a resentful stare; how, too, tried to pique him by laughing and flirting directly with some favoured lover. But what had followed? He had only smilingly told her that he was in nowise jealous, and that she would come to him with open arms at last. She recalled, as she sat thinking there, how she had turned from him with a haughty feeling of annoyance; while now that she was so cruelly abased he seemed to be her only hope, the one to whose strong arm she was forced to look for aid; and with a bitter wail of misery, as she thought of him once more, in spite of her efforts to drive away the fancy, she kept on asking herself those ever-recurring questions, what would he think of her--what would he say?