But although Ethel chose to go scarcely anywhere, she was not without friends of her own age who came to seek her out in her self-imposed solitude and retail to her the very latest items of local gossip, consisting, as is usual in such cases, of a pretty equal admixture of fact and fiction. Thus it was that she came to learn of the violent quarrel which had taken place between Mr. Launce Keymer and his father, and of how the latter had cut down his son’s allowance of three hundred a year to a pound a week. As a matter of course, a dozen different versions were afloat as to the origin of the quarrel, but, in reality, the facts of the case seemed to be known to no one except the two people concerned. Almost immediately afterwards Launce had left the town, and among all his intimates there was not one who professed to know where he had gone, or what had become of him. All this was recounted to Ethel as a piece of news which would be likely to interest her as one who had known Launce Keymer and had met him several times in society in the course of the previous summer and winter. There was no faintest suspicion in the narrator’s mind, so carefully had the secret of Ethel’s brief engagement been kept, that for the latter her news might have an interest very different from any that she imagined. When Ethel assured Miss Matilda that the wound from which she was suffering was one which time would quickly heal, she stated no more than she felt to be the fact. Between her and the man whose wife she had promised to become, everything was at an end; and although the relief was great—greater perhaps than she was aware of—she yet felt as if there was a void in her inner life which had never been there before. Her heart was empty. The doors of the temple were shut and the flame of the altar, which, truth to tell, had been of the frailest and feeblest, had been blown suddenly out. But Ethel turned away from brooding over the past and set her face resolutely towards the future. And so the summer wore on until the crown of it was turned and autumn was drawing on apace. It was Tamsin, whose eyes were ever keen where her darling was concerned, who was the first to notice that the wild-rose tints of Ethel’s cheeks were paling to the delicate ivory of the lily. She watched her closely for several days without saying a word to anyone. At length she made up her mind to speak. It was Miss Jane’s month, and to her she went.