'Yes,' Pamela said wearily, and she looked out at the white gate which someone had left open. Perhaps she was thinking that she would soon pass through it, and her life here would be ended. Maria looked in the same direction; but the gate brought something else to her mind, and she forgot all about Pamela and the cocoa. 'Oh, the pity of it!' she murmured; and her eyes lingered on the spot where Wyatt Edgell had last stood. 'The pity of what?' Pamela said impatiently. She was nervous, irritable, over-strung, and everything jarred upon her. 'Nothing, dear, nothing,' Maria said soothingly. 'I was only thinking of the man that girl is fooling. Oh, what idiots men are! Fancy a man--a real man, not a fool--throwing himself away upon that pink-and-white baby!' Pamela was listening with an abstracted air, but the colour crept up under her skin, and her lip curled. 'You mean the St. Benedict's man?' she said, smiling with a sort of contempt. 'Yes; the man that was talking to her at the gate. Oh, Pamela, did you see his face?' 'Ye--e--s; I saw his face. I have often seen him before. He is Eric's friend. I have known him ever since he has been up.' 'He has known you--you, Pamela--for years, and yet he has chosen her?' 'There is no accounting for taste--at least, for men's taste,' Pamela said scornfully; but she did not look at the girl she was speaking to; she looked out at the sunset. 'I tell you what it is,' Miss Stubbs said with an air of conviction. 'He has been dreaming all his life about the ideal woman, and what his fancy has painted her; and with this myth, this creation of his own heated imagination in his mind, he has met this--this baby, and he has invested her with all the attributes of his ideal. It isn't Lucy Rae he's in love with; it's the ideal woman that he has been all his life imagining.' Pamela smiled in a dreary way, but she still watched the sunset. 'Perhaps the circumstances--the very unusual circumstances--under which he first met her had something to do with it,' Maria went on in a lower voice. She was thinking of that scene in St. Benedict's that Lucy had described to her. 'Oh, you don't know what a meeting it was, Pam!' 'Yes,' said Pamela, with a little break in her voice, 'I know what it must have been to her; but no one can tell what it was to him.' 'You have heard, then! How did you hear?' Maria asked breathlessly. 'She told me. She told me the first night; she could not sleep, and I found her wandering about the corridor in a panic of fear.' 'Did she tell you all--quite all?' 'She told me everything,' Pamela said; and again her lips quivered. 'Has she told you she has promised to marry him?' 'No, she has not told me that,' Pamela said with that rising tell-tale colour in her cheeks, and a hard steely light in her gray-blue eyes, which were no longer watching the sunset; 'but I don't think she will marry him.'