She could but kiss him, and hide her agitation in caresses, ere hurrying up the stairs she reached her own rooms, a single bed- chamber opening into a more spacious sitting-room, now partially lighted by the candles on the toilette-table within. She flung herself down on a chair beyond the line of light, and panted out half aloud, "Oh! I am in the toils! Oh for help! Oh for advice! Oh! if I knew the right! Am I unfair? am I cold and hard and proud? Is she telling me true? No, I know she is not--not the whole truth, and I don't know what is left out, or what is false! And I'm as bad--making them think I give in and discard Frank! Oh! is that my pride--or that it is too bad to encourage him now I know more? He'll soon scorn me, and leave off--whatever he ever thought of me. She has taken me from all my friends--and she will take him away! No one is left me but papa; and though she can't hurt his love, she has got his confidence away, and made him join against me! But that one thing I'll never, never do!" She started up, and opened a locked purple photograph-album, with 'In Memoriam' inscribed on it--her hands trembling so that she could hardly turn the key. She turned to the likeness of a young man--a painful likeness of a handsome face, where the hard verities of sun- painting had refused to veil the haggard trace of early dissipation, though the eyes had still the fascinating smile that had made her brother Tom, with his flashes of fitful good-nature, the idol of his little sister's girlhood. The deadly shock of his sudden death had been her first sorrow; and those ghastly whispers which she had heard from the servants in the nursery, and had never forgotten, because of the hushed and mysterious manner, had but lately started into full force and meaning, on the tongues of the plain-spoken poor. She gazed, and thought of the wrecked life that might have been so rich in joys; nay, her tenderness for her father could not hide from her how unlike his old age was from that of Mr. Bowater, or of any men who had done their service to their generation in all noble exertion. He had always indeed been her darling, her charge; but she had never known what it was to look up to him with the fervent belief and enthusiasm she had seen in other girls. To have him amused, loitering from reading-room to parade or billiard-room, had been all that she aspired to, and only lately had she unwillingly awakened to the sense how and why this was--and why the family were aliens in their ancestral home.