"My dear mother," he said, "you give me credit for far more virtues than I possess. But perhaps Miss Fitzmaurice knows already that all your home-farm poultry turn to swans, whatever they were to start with. I am afraid philanthropic schemes and I haven't had much to say to each other of late. And after all," here he spoke more slowly, and I knew that his words were tacitly addressed to me, "I doubt if my greatest sympathy is with the poor. It sounds hard-hearted perhaps, but there are, there must be, miseries which they could not feel in the same way as those of our own classes do," and again it seemed to me that I caught an almost inaudible sigh. And by one of those "brain-waves," as I believe it is now the fashion to call them, from that moment I felt convinced that he had been down at the Grim House again, and that troubles were thickening there. There came another murmur of maternal admiration from Mrs Payne, but her son's last words had saddened me, and a moment or two later I owned to being tired and sleepy, and we bade each other good-night. My first waking thoughts the next morning were that something strange and unexpected had happened. For a moment or two the unfamiliar room, with its handsome but heavy furniture, very different from the light chintz-hung quarters, with their pretty little adornments, which my godmother had prepared for me, added to my confusion of mind. Then, bit by bit, the events of the day before unrolled themselves in my memory. "What can be the matter," I thought, "with the Greys? For I am perfectly certain that something new or worse _is_ the matter. And how can I find out? And what could I do to help them if I knew? Would it, could it ever be right and honourable to tell what I heard--that name?" My heart beat faster at the very idea. I felt as if I _must_ confide my perplexities to some one; yet to do so to Clarence Payne would, I knew, be manifestly unfair, unless I could tell him the whole. Still, might there not be a sort of compromise? Under the circumstances, the very strange circumstances, of our both knowing what we did, though he little suspected the _possibly_ vital information I possessed--under the circumstances, surely there would be no breach of etiquette or even of good taste in my asking him if he had been there, and if my intuitions as to some new cause of distress were correct? For before I could even battle out the question with myself thoroughly as to whether anything would justify me in betraying my secret, I must know if the new complications I suspected lay in that direction. And Clarence was my only possible source of information. Isabel knew nothing, I felt sure, and it was not the least use applying to her.