As she thus went on murmuring broken sentences, the two men whom she had seen approached the house, rang the bell, and Helen could hear their heavy footsteps mount the stairs. She had turned her head towards the door when they came into the house; but the moment that her eyes were directed towards the window again, she saw the figure of Lord Hadley, coming down the path with a proud, light, self-confident step, and instantly starting up once more, she closed the book, and ran out of the room. A maid was in the passage, and in an eager and frightened tone, the beautiful girl exclaimed, "Tell him exactly what I said, Margaret. If he asks for me, say I will not see him. Make no excuses, but tell him plainly and at once, I will not." "That I will, Miss Helen," answered the woman, heartily. "Shall I ask Ben the ploughman to thrash him if he won't go away?" If Helen had uttered the reply that first rose in her mind, her words would have been, "I wish to heaven you would!" but she refrained, and saying, "No; no violence, Margaret," she ran up stairs to her own room, and seated herself near a little table, after locking the door. What passed below she could not hear; but between that chamber and the next was a partition of old dark oak, not carved into panels, as in the rooms below, but running in long polished planks from the ceiling to the floor, with the edges rounded into mouldings, for the sake of some slight degree of ornament. They were tightly joined together, but still the words of any one speaking in a loud tone in the one room, could be heard in the other; and it seemed to Helen, from the pitch to which two or three of the voices were elevated, that one of the party at least in her uncle's chamber was somewhat hard of hearing. Her thoughts for a moment or two after she entered, were too much agitated for her to pay any particular attention; but all remained still below, and she said to herself, "He has gone in to wait for my father, or to sit down and rest himself, as he pretends, I dare say. I wonder how a gentleman can have recourse to such false excuses, and here I must be kept a prisoner till he chooses to go."