“Oh, really, do you think so?” cried Mrs. Bellingham; “then you would not think it worth a very high price, Aubrey? I am very glad of that--for I thought we might be obliged to offer a large sum--” “It is a beautiful picture,” said Margaret, hotly; she could not bear anything to be said against this rooted belief of hers: its presence alarmed and troubled her, but she would not have it undervalued. “If it were to be sold it would be worth a great deal of money--it is a beautiful picture; but there is nothing about selling it,” she cried, a flush rising into her cheeks. “It was done for--papa: money would not buy it--and him that painted it was not thinking about money.” Her pronouns, poor child, were wrong, but her heart was right. Rob Glen was her greatest terror on earth, but she would be just to him all the same. “But that is just what I cannot be satisfied about,” said Jean. “If you pay a man for his work, why there you are! but if you don’t pay him, or give him anything as an equivalent, why where are you? Every man must be paid one way or another. Open Bell’s letter, Margaret, and tell me if she says anything about it. I shall have to write to Ludovic, or to the young man himself, if we do not know what he means.” Margaret opened Bell’s letter with a hand that trembled a little. She did not expect to find anything there on the subject which had so deeply occupied her; but still, to open this thick enclosure before Jean, whose mind was so much set upon it that something was to be found there, and who would watch her while she read it, and ask to see Bell’s humble epistle, was very alarming. She opened it with a tremulousness which she could scarcely disguise. Bell had folded her letter, which was written on a large sheet of paper, in the way in which letters had been folded before the days of envelopes, and consequently it was with some little delay and difficulty that a trembling hand opened the big folds. But Margaret was suddenly petrified, frozen to her very heart with terror, when she saw another letter lying enclosed--a tiny letter of a very different aspect from Bell’s. She dared not move--she dared not do anything to show the greatness of the shock she had received. The danger was not of a kind that she dared disclose. The paper shook in her hands convulsively, and then they became preternaturally still and steady. She did not know Rob Glen’s handwriting, but she knew that this was from him by instinct, by inspiration of her terror. What was she to do? Her face she felt grow crimson, then fell into a chill of paleness; and when she lifted her eyes in a momentary glance of panic to see if Jean was looking at her, she met the eyes of Aubrey, and without knowing what she did, in a kind of delirium made a terrified, instantaneous appeal to him. Her thoughts were too hurried, her desperation too complete even to make her conscious that the appeal was unreasonable, or, indeed, aware that she had made it, till the thing