Nevertheless, he tenderly considered how frightful a shock she would experience should she realize that it was she who had set this hideous monster of falsehood grimly a-stalk as fact. "But never let her know!" he insisted with an unselfish thoughtfulness that endeared him the more to those who already loved him. In that silent life of hers, so much apart, he would fain that not even a vague echo of reproach should sound. In those mute thoughts, which none might divine, he would not evoke a suggestion of regret. One could hardly forecast the effect, he urged. A sorrow like this might prove beyond the reach of reason, of remonstrance, of consolation. She loved him, the silent, little thing! and he loved her. Never, never, let her know. And thus, although in the storm centre all else was changed, swept with sudden gusts of tempestuous grief, now and again reverberating with strange echoes of tumults beyond, all a-tremor with terror and frightful presage, calm still prevailed in her restricted little life. But to maintain this placidity was not without its special difficulties. More than once her grandfather's deep depression caught her intelligent attention, and she would pause to gaze wistfully, helplessly, sadly, upon him. Upon discovering Leonora in tears one day she flung herself on her knees beside her cousin, and kissing her hands wept and sobbed bitterly in sympathy with she knew not what. Sometimes she was moved to ask the dreary little twins if aught were amiss, and when they shook their heads in negation, she promptly signed that she did not believe them. Once she came perilously near the solution of the mystery that baffled her. Missing the visits of Baynell, who of course was still in arrest, she asked the twins if he were ill, and when they hysterically protested that he was well, a shadow of aghast apprehension hovered over her face, and she solemnly queried if he were dead. The phrase, "Never let her know," was like a dying wish, as sacred, as imperative, and Judge Roscoe hastily interfered to assure her that Baynell was indeed alive and well, and affected to rebuke the twins, saying that they were getting so dull and slow in the manual alphabet that they could scarcely answer a simple question of their sister's, and set them to spelling on their fingers under Lucille's instruction the first stanza of "The boy stood on the burning deck."