‘You know perfectly well that Mr. Mallory and Miss Blisset are desperately in love with one another--deny it if you can.’ Hugo was silent. ‘You cannot,’ said Helena, triumphantly. ‘I am not in their confidence,’ he said slowly. ‘All the world is in the confidence of people who are so far gone as they are. If you mean to say that they did not each take you separately aside, and tell you in so many words--well, I can say the same. He that hath eyes to see, let him observe.’ Hugo was not yet master enough of the English language to be able to turn off her remark. Helena began to hum a little song to herself, and then suddenly sank into silence and gravity, until it began to snow, and grew quite dark, when she shivered, putting up her umbrella, and saying pettishly, ‘My mantle will be ruined. Why didn’t I bring a cloak? I declare, another day, when the weather is so bad, I won’t take this horrid long walk.’ ‘You will rather drive?’ suggested Hugo, with apparently the most childlike innocence of her meaning. ‘How ridiculous you are! How far is it, Hugo, from the mill to Stonegate?’ ‘About as far as from the mill to Castle Hill, only in exactly the opposite direction.’ ‘Oh! I don’t know that end of the town at all. We, at any rate, have had time for a delightful conversation, haven’t we? Come in, and have some tea, and play me something.’ Nothing loth, Hugo followed her, and they vanished within the portals of Castle Hill. CHAPTER V. ‘Death, with most grim and grisly visage seene, Yet is he nought but parting of the breath; Ne ought to see, but like a shade to weene, Unbodièd, unsoul’d, unheard, unseene.’ Adrienne and Sebastian were walking ‘just the opposite way,’ with very little more satisfaction to themselves than Hugo and Helena had found. Helena was constantly picturing Sebastian to herself as engaged in half-intellectual, half-amorous discourse with the ‘nicest of girls;’ his mind elevated by her spiritual observations, and his languid but ever-present sense of superiority (this was Helena’s hypothesis) gratified by her deference to his superior wisdom. It was a comical theory--one worthy of Helena’s vivid imagination and hopelessly impractical ideas; and was, moreover, as far removed from the truth as she herself could possibly have wished. Yes, wished; for while the delusive vision kept dangling before her mental eyes, and while she professed to sneer and scoff at it, it was in reality an ever-present, dull pain, none the less real because not clearly comprehended for what it was.