But a full hour after their separation for the night, each one was as wide awake as she had been all day. Elizabeth was kneeling on the floor by her bedside, still half-dressed--she had not changed her attitude for a long time, though the undulations of her body showed how far from passive rest she was--when Patty, clothed only in her night-gown, crept in, making no noise with her bare feet. "Elizabeth," she whispered, laying her hand on her sister's shoulder, "are you asleep?--or are you saying your prayers?" Elizabeth, startled, lifted up her head, and disclosed to Patty's gaze in the candle-light a pale, and strained, and careworn face, "I was saying my prayers," she replied, with a dazed look. "Why are you out of bed, my darling? What is the matter?" "That is what I want to know," said Patty, sitting down on the bed. "What is the matter with us all? What has come to us? Nelly has been crying ever since I put the light out--she thought I couldn't hear her, but she was mistaken--sobbing and sniffing under the bedclothes, and blowing her nose in that elaborately cautious way--" "Oh, poor, dear child!" interrupted the maternal elder sister, making a start towards the door. "No, don't go to her," said Patty, putting out her hand; "leave her alone--she is quiet now. Besides, you couldn't do her any good. Do you know what she is fretting about? Because Mr. Westmoreland has been neglecting her. Would you believe it? She is caring about it, after all--and we thought it was only fun. She doesn't care about _him_, she couldn't do that--" "We can't tell," interrupted Elizabeth. "It is not for us to say. Perhaps she does, poor child!" "Oh, she _couldn't_," Patty scornfully insisted. "That is quite impossible. No, she has got fond of this life that we are living now with Mrs. Duff-Scott--I have seen it, how it has laid hold of her--and she would like to marry him so that she could have it always. That is what _she_ has come to. Oh, Elizabeth, don't you wish we had gone to Europe at the very first, and never come to Melbourne at all!" Here Patty herself broke down, and uttered a little shaking, hysterical sob. "Everything seems to be going wrong with us here! It does not look so, I know, but at the bottom of my heart I feel it. Why did we turn aside to waste and spoil ourselves like this, instead of going on to the life that we had laid out--a real life, that we should never have had to be ashamed of?"