Mary Hill sat alone, not noticed by anyone. She occupied the place which a governess of retiring manners does in such a party. All governesses are not persons of retiring manners, and consequently the rule does not always hold. And Miss Hill was not the governess. She was not a salaried dependent, but a friend who in reality conferred instead of receiving benefits: but it was as a dependent that everybody regarded her. She sat very quiet with a sense of guilt towards Letitia, which was entirely gratuitous, and a confusing feeling that she was somehow to blame. That she would be blamed she was very well aware, and her powers of vindicating and asserting herself were small. Beyond this there was great trouble and confusion in Mary’s mind. The sight of this big, flushed, disorderly, half-savage man had been a revelation to her even more distressing than his sudden appearance had been to her friend. Letitia’s pride was assailed, but in Mary the wound went a great deal deeper. When Ralph had been sent to Australia ten years before, he was young, and his offences, though terrible to a girl’s sensitive innocence and ignorance, had been things to weep and pray over rather than to denounce. Poor Ralph! he had been her sweetheart when they were children, he had supposed himself in love with her years ago, and Mary had carried all these years a softened image of him in her heart. She had sighed to herself over it in many a lonely hour. Poor Ralph! if her expectations of his return had never been clear, it was still always a possibility pleasant to think of. And now he had come, and her faintly visioned idol had fallen prone to the ground, like Dagon in his temple. He had never attained the importance of a demi-god, to whom sacred litanies might be said. But there had been a vague niche for him in the background of the temple. And in a moment he had fallen, with the first sound of his rough voice and sight of his deteriorated countenance. Mary was still under the influence of this shock, and it was complicated by the conviction that she was to blame, that Letitia would think she was to blame, that she would be accused and would not know how to defend herself. She sat alone, trembling over the evening paper which she was pretending to read. She heard the _chuchotement_ of the soft yet venomous voices near, which were tearing Letitia’s pretensions to pieces, and assuring each other that they had always known her to be a nobody, and the other less audible strain of Letitia’s narrative to Lady Witheringham. What romance was she telling about poor Ralph to interest the old lady so--poor Ralph, who never had any story but vulgar dissipation and the sharp remedy of being turned out of his father’s house to do as he pleased!