Claire clasped her hands together and gazed at her sister with a face full of wonder, she seemed so calm and unconcerned, as if it were some one else's trouble and not her own that had brought the tears into her eyes. "But, May, why did not you confide in me?" "Likely! You were always scolding and snubbing me, as it was. I don't know what you would have said if you had known. Besides, I was afraid of you in those days." "May, you will drive me mad," said Claire, pacing the room. "Nonsense; and don't go on running up and down the room like that. Be sensible, and help me." "Why have you not told me before?" "I've been going to tell you heaps of times, but you've always had something or other to worry about, and I've been put off." "Till you knew that detection was inevitable; and now you come to me," cried Claire reproachfully. "Look here, Claire, are you going to talk sensibly, or am I to go to some lady friend to help me? There's Mrs Pontardent." "No, no," cried Claire excitedly. "You must not take anyone else into your confidence. Tell me all. But May, May, is this really true, or is it some miserable invention of your own?" "Oh, it's true enough," said May sharply, as she arranged her bonnet strings, and bent forward to catch a glimpse of her great ostrich feather. Claire looked at her with her face drawn with care and horror, while she wondered at the indifference of the little wife, and the easy way in which she was trying to shift the trouble and responsibility of her weakness and folly upon her sister. "Why, May, you could not have been seventeen." "Sixteen and a half," said May. "Heigho! I begin to feel quite an old woman now." "But, Frank? Do you ever think of the consequences if he were to know?" "Why, of course I do, you silly thing. Haven't I lain in bed and quaked hundreds of times for fear he should ever find out? How can you talk so? Why do you suppose I came to you, if it was not that I was afraid of his getting to know?" "May, it would drive our father mad if all came out." "Of course it would. Now you are beginning to wake up and understand why I have come." "How could you accept Frank Burnett, and deceive him so?" "How could I marry him? What would papa have said if I had refused? Don't talk stuff." Claire's brow knit more and more, as she realised her sister's utter want of principle, and her heart seemed rent by anger, pity, and grief. "Besides, do you suppose I wanted to stop here and pinch and starve when a rich husband and home were waiting for _me_? Poor Louis was dead, and if I'd cried my eyes out every week and said I'd be a widow for ever and ever, it would not have brought him to life." Claire did not speak. Her words would not come, and she gazed in utter perplexity, struggling to realise the fact that the girlish little thing before her could possibly have been a widow and mother before she became Mrs Burnett. "When--when did this begin?" said Claire at last.