“I cannot lie here,” she said, and putting on her dressing-gown she drew her chair to the grate where the fire which Pierre had replenished just before she retired was burning, and with her face buried in her hands, began to think such thoughts as made the drops of perspiration stand thickly upon her forehead and about her lips. “Who was the Tina who wrote to my father?” she asked herself. Not Christine; that would be too horrible. Christine had been her mother’s maid, and it was not like a proud man like Frederick Hetherton to think of such as she. There were other Tinas in the world. The writer of the letter was some bright-eyed, bright-faced girl of humble origin, who had caught her father’s fancy for a few days and been flattered by a kind word from him, and possibly, he was for the moment more interested in her than he ought to have been. That was all; and she was foolish to be so disquieted. Thus Queenie reasoned, or tried to, but all the time a terrible fear was tugging at her heart, and she was living over again that dreadful death scene on the ship when her father made her swear to forgive him whatever might come to her knowledge. She had thought at first that he meant her American relations, of whom he had never told her, and she had forgiven that long ago. Then came the mystery concerning Christine and her concealment of her identity, but Reinette had recovered from that and still there was a nameless terror at her heart, as she sat alone in her room while the clock struck the hours two and three, and the fire in the grate grew lower, and the winter night seemed to grow thicker and colder around her. At last, when she could keep still no longer, she arose, and pacing the room hurriedly, beat the air with her hands, as she was wont to do under great excitement. “What is it I fear?” she asked herself. “What is it I suspect? Let me put it into words, and see if it sounds so very dreadful. I suspect that Christine Bodine, in her girlhood—when, I dare say, she was rather pretty and piquant, after mother died made herself very necessary to my father and attracted him more than she ought to have done. Such people are very ambitious, and susceptible, too; and if my father was at all familiar in his manner toward her, she probably was flattered at once, and maybe cheated herself, into the belief that he would marry her, when such an idea never existed in his brain. She probably wrote to him, and he answered and at last made her see how mistaken she was in supposing he could ever think of her after having known my mother. And then, by way of amends, he settled that money upon her. Yes, that is probably the fact of the case,” she continued, and the tightness around her heart gave way. She could breathe more freely, and her hands ceased to beat the air, until like lightning there flashed into her mind: