The colleague journeyed down to us and shuffled and stammered: he recommended an appeal to a high authority in London. The high authority was summoned by telegraph and paid us a flying visit. He enunciated the valuable opinion that it was a very curious case and dropped the striking remark that in so charming a home a young lady ought to bloom like a flower. The young lady's late hostess came over, but she could throw no light on anything: all that she had ever noticed was that Louisa had seemed "rather blue" for a day or two before she brought her visit to a close. Our days were dismal enough and our nights were dreadful, for I took turns with Helen in sitting up with the girl. Chantry Court itself seemed conscious of the riddle that made its chambers ache; it bowed its grey old head over the fate of its daughter. The people who had been coming were put off; dinner became a ceremony enacted mainly by the servants. I sat alone with Christopher Chantry, whose honest hair, in his mystification, stuck out as if he had been overhauling accounts. My hours with Louisa were even more intensely silent, for she almost never looked at me. In the watches of the night however I at last saw more clearly into what she was thinking of. Once when I caught her wan eyes resting upon me I took advantage of it to kneel down by her bed and speak to her with the utmost tenderness. "If you can't say it to your mother, can you say it perhaps to _me_?" She gazed at me for some time. "What does it matter now--if I'm dying?" I shook my head and smiled. "You won't die if you get it off your mind." "You'd be cruel to him," she said. "He's innocent--he's innocent." "Do you mean _you're_ guilty? What trifle are you magnifying?" "Do you call it a trifle----?" She faltered and paused. "Certainly I do, my dear." Then I risked a great stroke. "I've often done it myself!" "_You_? Never, never! I was cruel to him," she added. This puzzled me; I couldn't work it into my conception. "How were you cruel?" "In the garden. I changed suddenly, I drove him away, I told him he filled me with horror." "Why did you do that?" "Because my shame came over me." "Your shame?" "What I had done in the house." "And what had you done?" She lay a few moments with her eyes closed, as if she were living it over. "I broke out to him, I told him," she began at last. But she couldn't continue, she was powerless to utter it. "Yes, I know what you told him. Millions of girls have told young men that before." "They've been asked, they've been asked! They didn't speak _first_! I didn't even know him, he didn't care for me, I had seen him for the first time the day before. I said strange things to him, and he behaved like a gentleman." "Well he might!" "Then before he could turn round, when we had simply walked out of the house together and strolled in the garden--it was as if I were borne along in the air by the wonder of what I had said--it rolled over me that I was lost." "Lost?"