To the many letters of the former--letters agonising in tenor--addressed to Jack Elliot and to her brother Roland, no answer ever came, while weeks became months; for many difficulties just then attended the correspondence of the troops that were on the arduous expedition for the relief of Khartoum. Thus, amid all the sorrows of Hester, how keen and great was the anxiety of Maude! Jack, her husband--if he _was_ her husband--was now face to face with the enemy--those terrible Soudanese--and might perish in the field, by drowning, or by fever, before she could ever have elucidated the mystery, the cloud, the horrible barrier that had come between them. At times the emotions that shook the tender form of Maude were terrible, since the night of that woman's visit, when the iron seemed to enter her soul; and there descended upon her a darkness through which there had come no gleam of light. The past and the future seemed all absorbed in the blank misery of the present, and as if her life was to be one career of abiding shame, emptiness, and misery, as a dishonoured wife--if wife she was at all! Hawkey Sharpe had inflicted the revengeful blow; the woman, his degraded tool, had disappeared, and her story remained undisproved as yet. Jack, as we have said, might perish in Egypt, and the truth or the falsehood of that odious story would then be buried in his grave! The pretty villa near the Grange Loan--the wood-shaded Loan that led of old to St. Giles's Grange--she now went near no more; it was torture to go back there--her home it never could be. Turn which way she would, her haggard eyes rested on some reminder of Jack's love or his presence there--their mutual household Lares: her piano, Jack's carefully selected gift; the music on the stand, chosen by him, and with his name and 'love' inscribed to her, just as she had left it; books, statuettes--pretty nothings, alas! Her mind now pointed to no definite course; she felt like a rudderless ship drifting through dark and stormy waters before a cruel blast; in all, her being there was no distinct resolution as yet what to do or whither to turn. Yet, calm as she seemed outwardly, there was in her tortured heart a passionate longing for peace, and peace meant, perhaps, death! And all this undeserved agony was but the result of a most artful but pitiful and vulgar vengeance! Whether born of thoughts caused by recent stirring news from the seat of war, we know not; but one night Hester woke from a dream of Roland--after a feverish and sleep-haunted doze--haunted as if by the spiritual presence of one who--bodily, at least--was far away. Waking with a start, she heard a familiar and firm step upon the staircase, and then a door opened--the door of that room which Roland had always occupied when at Merlwood. 'Roland--Roland!' she cried in terror, and then roused Maude.