Margery paused here, and with clasped hands, and eyes which had in them a rapt, far-away look, seemed almost to see looming on the horizon not far in the distance the something for which she longed, and which, when it came, would test her as few women have ever been tested in their love for another. It was not possible that the dark shadow touched her now, although it was so near, and yet she shivered a little and drew a long breath as she at last came back to the present and turned her eyes upon Mr. Beresford, who said to her: “Did you even see Queenie’s father?—did you know him, I mean—you or your mother?” “No, neither of us,” Margery answered promptly. “I saw him once when Queenie and I were riding in the Bois, and she made him come and speak to me, but I did not like him much. He impressed me as one very proud and haughty, who only endured me for Queenie’s sake. He was fine-looking, though, and his manners were very elegant. Did you know him, Mr. Beresford?” “Scarcely at all, as I was a mere boy when he went away, but I have heard much of him from the villagers; he was not very popular, I imagine,” Mr. Beresford replied, and then the conversation drifted into other channels, and they talked of Phil and Anna, and her engagement with the major, which was generally understood, but nothing more was said of Margery’s early life. Mr. Beresford had not succeeded in reading the page just as he had expected to read it, and was a good deal puzzled and perplexed when, at rather a late hour, he said good-night to Margery, and went back to his rooms at the hotel, with his mind full of what she had told him of her life as connected with Reinette Hetherton, and full too with thoughts of herself, and after he had retired to his bed, and a feeling of drowsiness began to steal over him, there came to him another face than Queenie’s—a fairer face, with golden hair and eyes of blue—and in his troubled dreams the face hid Queenie’s from him, and a voice with more of a foreign accent than Queenie’s was sounding in his ears. It was very late when he awoke, with a confused vision of black eyes and blue eyes dancing before him, and hastily dressing himself and swallowing his breakfast, he started for his office, where to his surprise he found Reinette Hetherton waiting for him. CHAPTER XXXI. THE INTERVIEW. Reinette had thought and thought till her head seemed bursting with the effort to solve the mystery of her nurse’s silence. Had she done anything that she was ashamed to tell, and if so what was it, and did it concern any one but herself?