This terrible interview had terminated much better than she could have hoped. She had got rid of Warren, who would be powerless for the future to harm her, and she had avoided the necessity for wounding her husband. When he returned, she not only hoped that foreign travel and new acquaintances would have weaned him from his infatuation for Warren, but supplied him with a sounder standard whereby to measure his claim to regard. But where was the triumph which she ought to have felt at such a solution of the difficulty which had beset and harassed her whole married life? No signs of triumph came to the overwrought feelings and tired nerves; on the contrary, a strange kind of terror, depression, and misery settled down upon her, the more irresistible as she endeavoured to disentangle and sort the incidents of the interview which had just taken place. Her woman's instinct really aroused, and not wrong for once, told her the victory had been too easily won. * * * * * * 'So there is an end of my journal,' wrote Helen the same night, when she was the only person awake under the roof. 'All my pretty and pleasant plans of setting down the inmost feelings of my heart, of recording them and every incident of the growth of my mind for Alston's eyes to see, are quite at an end. There is a secret in my life now which he must never know, and a dread within my breast which I cannot say to him that he might soothe it. How wretched they make me! how I detest them! Good heavens, how miserable one may be with everything beside one's-self to make one happy! I read over and over again the few pages I wrote this morning, and I ask myself, Can it be that I wrote them, and that since then I have learned so much of life, seen so much of human nature? That such treachery should exist as Trenton Warren's; that such credulity should exist as Alston's; that such blindness could be as mine! Thank God he has really promised to go away. I shall hardly breathe until he has gone, and I shall never stir beyond the door. He said he would go at once. How _am_ I to write to Alston? The journal plan I must abandon; I feel that would now be impossible. I must only just do one common every-day letter. Alston will not like it--he will reckon it as only one of my compromises. No matter; it is a convenient excuse for faults far worse even than I have ever committed.' CHAPTER VI. A MYSTERIOUS COMMISSION.