It was nightfall when she returned to the house. Time had gone imperceptibly, as it goes when there is nothing tangible in it. Long threads of reverie linked themselves into each other, going on and on as if they need never end, and coming back after all manner of digressions to the same central subject. “Don’t you think it’s time to be going, Miss?” the maid would say timidly from time to time. “Presently,” Clare would reply, hopelessly opening or shutting the book she had taken into her hands; but at length the sun began to sink, and it was evident they must begin their walk if they were to reach Arden before night. Clare swallowed Barbara’s glass of wine, and then set out upon the weary way. “It has been a nice quiet day,” she said, mechanically, fibbing with the instinct of good society, as she got up. “I hope it has done you good, Miss,” said Barbara, doubtfully. “Oh, all the good in the world,” said Clare. And with this forlorn fiction she walked home again; so much less sure of her own constancy; so much more doubtful of the possibility of shutting up secrets in a silence as of the grave, and living a perpetual life of sacrifice, without hope or call for sympathy, than she had been in the morning. She was very weary when she got home, weary in body and mind, and could only answer with a faint smile to the message which Wilkins gave her from her cousin. Jeanie had not kept him back to-day; only one day had he been kept back by all the united influences which could be brought to bear upon him. Had not she been hard upon him, sending him summarily away from her for one offence, he who perhaps all his life had been wronged so bitterly? Had he been wronged? Or was it a dream? And had he wronged her--or was this but a cloud that might pass away? When Clare had got rid of the servants, who worried her, and had also got rid of the poor pretence of dining which she went through in order not to reveal to them too clearly the commotion in her mind, she had another struggle with herself. Whether he had wronged her or had been wronged, surely it was best now to keep him at arm’s length. Better not to see him again, never to attempt to lean her cares upon him, to confide her difficulties to him. Oh, no, no! He must never come again. And Clare said to herself that she must live and die alone.