"You poor child!" said Lester, involuntarily, as he looked up from the letter. It was a word of sudden compassion wrested from him by the sight of Marcia's intolerable pain. He brought forward one of the deep library chairs, and made her sit in it, and as he bent over her his sympathy drew from her piteous little cries and stifled moans which he met with answering words of comfort. All consciousness of sex dropped away; the sharp-chinned face, the blue, black-fringed eyes, behind their spectacles, the noble brow under its pile of strong grizzled hair:--she saw them all as an embodied tenderness--courage and help made visible--a courage and help on which she gradually laid hold. She could not stop to ask herself how it was that, in this moment of shock and misery, she fell so naturally into this attitude of trust toward one with whom she had never yet set up any relation but that of a passing friendship. She only knew that there was comfort in his voice, his look, in his understanding of her suffering, in the reticence with which he handled it. She had lived beside him in the same house for months without ever really knowing him. Now suddenly--here was a friend--on whom to lean. But she could not speak to him of Newbury, though it was the thought of Newbury that was burning her heart. She did mention Coryston, only to say with energy: "I don't want to see him yet--not _yet_!" Lester could only guess at her meaning, and would not have probed her for the world. But after a little she braced herself, gave him a grateful, shrinking look, and, rising, she went in search of Sir Wilfrid and Arthur. Only Sir Wilfrid was in the hall when she reentered it. He had just dismissed a local reporter who had got wind of Miss Coryston's visit to the farm, and had rushed over to Coryston, in the hope of seeing her. "My dear child!" He hurried to meet her. "You look a perfect wreck! How _abominable_ that you should be mixed up with this thing!" "I couldn't help it," she said, vaguely, turning away at once from the discussion of it. "Where is Arthur? Mother wanted me to give him a message." [Illustration: NOW SUDDENLY--HERE WAS A FRIEND--ON WHOM TO LEAN] Sir Wilfrid looked uneasy. "He was here till just now. But he is in a curious state of mind. He thinks of nothing but one thing--and one person. He arrived late last night, and it is my belief that he hardly went to bed. And he is just hanging on the arrival of a letter--" "From Enid Glenwilliam?" "Evidently. I tried to get him to realize this horrible affair--the part the Newburys had played in it--the effect on you--since that poor creature appealed to you. But no--not a bit of it! He seems to have neither eyes nor ears--But here he is!" Sir Wilfrid and Marcia stepped apart. Arthur came into the hall from the library entrance. Marcia saw that he was much flushed, and that his face wore a hard, determined look, curiously at variance with its young features and receding chin.