But there was yet something that she must do, to seal that treaty of which her daughter was the dictator. Her own compact was to be made: she made it. "I will do as you wish, Margaret. They are hard terms to set, to _your mother_; but I accept them." "Very well, then. We understand each other, now; and I hope there will never be another painful word between us. I will try to speak none, and for both our sakes I hope you will be as careful. Now leave me, please. I will draw to this other shutter, for I need darkness, silence and rest--yes, rest!" The closed blind left the room in almost total dusk. The mother left the room, stepping slowly and appearing to bear about with her a dim consciousness that within the past half-hour her relative position with her daughter had been most signally changed. Margaret Hayley threw herself once more on the sofa, buried her fevered brow and her dishevelled hair in the soft, cool, white pillow, and sought that wished-for "rest." Alas! no tyrant ever invented a torture-bed so full of weary turnings and agonized prayers for deliverance or oblivion, as the softest couch whereon young love, suddenly and hopelessly bereft, reaches out its arms in vain, finds emptiness, and falls back despairing--moaning for the lost twin of its soul! The agony may be all forgotten to-morrow, in the sunshine, and the intoxication of music, and the voices of friends, and the far-off dawning of a new passion; but oh, what is the martyrdom of to-night. * * * * * The third and last of these supplementary scenes, occurring at nearly the same period in the afternoon as the second, has its location at the house of Robert Brand, and a part of it in the same room where we have before seen the testy invalid while receiving the news of his son's defection and disgrace. Robert Brand was once more back in his easy-chair, his injured limb again propped on the pillows, and his face showing all those contortions of extraordinary pain likely to be induced by his imprudent ride and the agitation attending it. Satisfied, now, that his son was not dead, the tender father had again died out in him; but made aware by a succession of facts, which he could neither understand nor doubt, that that son, just characterized, even by himself, as a hopeless coward, had since that time been fighting, and fighting without any evidence of cowardice, in a species of hand-to-hand conflict likely to try the courage quite as seriously as the shock of any ordinary battle,--he was mentally in a state of confusion on the young man's account, altogether unusual with him and not a little painful. He did not curse any more, or at least no more of his curses were aimed at the head of his son.