This short dialogue took place in Helen's boudoir, whither Mrs. Jenkins had gone to seek her sister after she had ushered Helen's ominous visitors into her husband's library, where she was awaiting them. Miss Montressor had by this time awakened from her nap, greatly refreshed and reinvigorated, and was looking very dainty and captivating; she had arranged her hair by the aid of a pocket-comb and a pocket-mirror which invariably accompanied her, together with a cunningly-devised little casket containing pearl-powder, to the use of which, to say the truth, she was too much addicted off the stage; and she was now perfectly prepared to undergo a whole set of new sensations with regard to the Griswold murder, for in that familiar phrase had the at-first-vague calamity ranged itself in the minds of Miss Montressor and Bryan Duval. The interview between Helen Griswold, her two friends, and the police officers lasted so long, that the grievous apprehension possessed Mrs. Jenkins as to the effect which such sustained interrogation, with all its horrors of assumption and actual pain, must produce on Helen's enfeebled frame. To the acute and experienced eye of Mrs. Jenkins, who had done a great deal in the way of nursing invalids in her time, and who had that quick perception of illness natural to woman, however uneducated, Helen's health had suffered much more severely under the excruciating trial of the last three days than Thornton Carey or Bryan Duval believed. In her very composure Mrs. Jenkins saw partly an unnatural effort and partly physical exhaustion; she did not cry, or scream, or throw herself about, or give way to any violent demonstration of the suffering which was racking her, quite as much because she was unable to do so, as because her good sense and her resolution induced her to give as little trouble and inflict as little distress upon the friends who were nobly endeavouring to aid her as possible; but they perceived only one of these reasons for her quietude. In voice, that most distinctive symptom, as well as in face, Helen Griswold was changed; something was gone from both destined never to return to them: the sweet clear _timbre_ in the former, the roundlike brightness in the latter. In after years Helen was a handsomer woman than she had been in those days of honoured and happy matronhood, in her splendid home with the husband who was so devoted to her; but the beauty of these latter years was of a different cast from that in which he had taken such delight and it indicated a mind matured and a heart strengthened, both results reached by a process of untold severity.