In her room at the same hour sat Nita Bolton: the door locked, the lamp lighted. She was attired in a flowing dressing-gown, her hair falling in two long, thick plaits over her shoulders. Nita had beautiful hair—beautiful, that is, in quality, if not remarkable in colour. It was of a dull, soft brown, without the suspicion of a tawny hue in it, or of a glint of gold, but it was slightly wavy, fine, soft, and abundant, and she had a harmless pride and pleasure in it. She was seated just now at a very elegant-looking writing-table, an article of furniture which had so far been also distinctly an article of luxury, for Nita’s letters were very, very few. It was not a letter with which she was this night engaged. No! Open before her was a substantially-bound volume, with a Chubb’s lock, and a little key to open and close the same—a precaution which lost some of its value when one considers how easy it would have been for an evil-disposed person to carry off the book, lock and all, if he wished to pry into the sacred contents thereof. In this precious volume Miss Bolton was in the habit of inscribing her day’s adventures, or no-adventures, and her own valuable comments and reflections thereupon, together with dark and gloomy musings upon the sorrows and misfortunes of this present life; the strange and inexplicable arrangements of Destiny (with a capital D), and a chronicle of her mental experiences in general. Many pages of such lucubrations filled the earlier portion of the volume. To-night Anita’s pen had not run with its accustomed rapidity over the page. She had recorded how ‘John returned from London yesterday morning, and came in in the evening and brought me some novels, because he said he knew I cared for nothing else, which was mean of the dear old fellow.’ How ‘Aunt Margery came to dinner, and sat with me all afternoon, and was very amusing. What a clever old thing she is!’ How, ‘about six o’clock, I heard papa’s voice, and looked up, wondering what had dragged him away from his beloved Dante, at that hour, and I saw him coming along with a gentleman, a stranger, the very handsomest man I ever saw.’ Then followed a minute description of the introduction, of every word that Jerome had said, that Aunt Margery and papa had said, that ‘I’ had said, and in addition, what ‘I’ thought on the subject: To her diary Nita might betray, and did betray what she would conceal from all others, the fact that from the moment in which she had looked up and met Jerome’s eyes, she had been fascinated, spell-bound, possessed with the thought of him.