“What shall I do? I can’t let mother know I heard--she would tell him, and I wouldn’t have any chance.” Her anguish almost broke out into a cry. “Oh! what have I done to have such a mother?”--her teeth gritting as she kept back the words. “And he will marry me then, will he? He will marry a dose of poison, and I will hang for it first! To sit there in cold blood and talk of murder--and she so young.” She rocked to and fro. Cristiane le Marchant was in her way, but that was a thing to fight and triumph over. Not even to marry Miles Cylmer would Ismay let that awful scheme of death be played out. And her mother had begged to him, not defied him; that cry of “Mark, Mark!” still rang in the daughter’s ears. Could it be true what he said, that it was she who had poisoned Abbotsford? Had her mother managed to deceive even her when she swore she had no hand in it? “I will find out!” The girl’s dumb lips were awful in the dusk. “I will make Marcus Wray a thing the world shudders at before I am done. I will take care of Cristiane,” she moaned sharply, remembering how she had said these very words to Cylmer. “Oh, you’ll love me in the end,” she panted, as though he could hear the thought in her brain. “I would die for you; surely you’ll love me in the end!” Frightened at her own passion, she got up in the dark and bathed her face in cold water, and washed the hands that were soiled from the dust in her ambush. Her mother would wonder, if she came in before dinner and found her in a dress all gray with dust. She made a careful toilet, that she might be ready when the gong rang for dinner, and looked at herself in the glass. But her own eyes were dreadful to her, for they were the eyes of a hunted beast at bay. She turned quickly from the glass. She could not think if she saw her own face, and think she must before she had to meet Marcus Wray. She opened the window to the bitter winter air, and its chill cleared her brain. First, there was that matter of Lord Abbotsford, and the hold it had given Wray on her mother. He must have proof of what the latter denied, or she would not be in such terror of him. The thought brought no new terror to Ismay Trelane; true or not, the accusation was Marcus Wray’s weapon, and she must look for one of her own that would turn its edge. Then there was Cylmer. He, too, would be against her mother if he knew all, and Wray would stick at nothing if he once knew that Ismay loved another man. He must know nothing of Cylmer; yet, if he stayed here, how was he to be kept in the dark? And Cristiane? Suppose Ismay’s dull suspicion were true, and Cylmer loved her, why should she live to come between him and Ismay Trelane? The girl, sitting, with clenched hands, on her bed, answered her own question.