can I stop her? And why should I!--it is her business, it is not mine. If she had been a girl in the village---- But then I said it should not occur again.” Thus Clare mused: and as the slow moments went on, her musing grew into a kind of rhythm of broken fancies, all bound together by the continued burden--“I said it should not occur again.” It was like a song which she thus murmured to herself, or rather which murmured in her ears without any will of hers, rising and falling, with its refrain--“I said it should not occur again.” At length the refrain gained upon the rest, and repeated and repeated itself till her brain grew dizzy. At all events she had to keep her word--and what should she do? Should she interpose authoritatively, as was her right as the natural protectress of every girl in Arden? Should she write to him herself, and warn him that his evil designs were known, and she, the champion and shield of her maidens, in arms against him? Should she act imperiously and with a high hand, by sending Jeanie and her grandmother out of her territory? She was so used to think as well as act _en princesse_ that neither of those plans seemed quite impracticable to Clare. They were, on the contrary, quite natural, things which had she been less concerned she would not have hesitated to do. But, alas, she was intimately concerned, and her arm seemed paralysed. She gave forth the sentence without hesitation, but as for the manner of executing it, she seemed only capable of thrusting the sword into herself. Then a sudden thought struck her. As it came to her all at once, so she executed it all at once, with the impatient and irritable haste of suffering. Half the mad things that people do when they are in trouble are done in this way. Their brain grows dizzy over deep-laid plans and long-nursed impossible conceptions, and then a sudden suggestion comes across them and they obey it on the moment. She started up and brought her blotting-book from the writing-desk where it was, to the ring of light round the lamp. And she wrote the following note hastily, without even pausing to draw breath:--