The first hint of an abnormality of conditions came after she had rung the bells and had waited in vain for response to her summons. There were servants whose business it was to answer bells at once. If _all_ the bells were out of order, why were they out of order when Hélène was to return in a few days and her apartment was supposed to be complete? Even to the kittens—even to the kittens! “It seems as if I had been locked in,” she had whispered to the silence of the room. “Why did they lock the doors?” Then she said, and her heart began to thump and race in her side: “It has been done on purpose. They don’t intend to let me out—for some _horrible_ reason!” Perhaps even her own growing panic was not so appalling as a sudden rushing memory of Lady Etynge, which, at this moment, overthrew her. Lady Etynge! Lady Etynge! She saw her gentle face and almost affectionately watching eyes. She heard her voice as she spoke of Hélène; she felt the light pat which was a caress. “No! No!” she gasped it, because her breath had almost left her. “No! No! She couldn’t! No one could! There is _nothing_ as wicked—as that!” Bat, even as she cried out, the overthrow was utter, and she threw herself forward on the arm of the couch and sobbed—sobbed with the passion she had only known on the day long ago when she had crawled into the shrubs and groveled in the earth. It was the same kind of passion—the shaken and heart-riven woe of a creature who has trusted and hoped joyously and has been forever betrayed. The face and eyes had been so kind. The voice so friendly! Oh, how could even the wickedest girl in the world have doubted their sincerity. Unfortunately—or fortunately—she knew nothing whatever of the mental processes of the wicked girls of the world, which was why she lay broken to pieces, sobbing—sobbing, not at the moment because she was a trapped thing, but because Lady Etynge had a face in whose gentleness her heart had trusted and rejoiced. When she sat upright again, her own face, as she lifted it, would have struck a perceptive onlooker as being, as it were, the face of another girl. It was tear-stained and wild, but this was not the cause of its change. The soft, bird eyes were different—suddenly, amazingly older than they had been when she had believed in Hélène. She had no experience which could reveal to her in a moment the monstrousness of her danger, but all she had ever read, or vaguely gathered, of law breakers and marauders of society, collected itself into an advancing tidal wave of horror. She rose and went to the window and tried to open it, but it was not intended to open. The decorative panes were of small size and of thick glass. Her first startled impression that the white framework seemed to be a painted metal was apparently founded on fact. A strong person might have bent it with a hammer, but he could not have broken it. She examined the windows in the other rooms and they were of the same structure.