Wearied with five days’ almost incessant travelling, and exhausted with the mingled emotions which had filled the last forty-eight hours, Ellen, though she had determined not to rest till her mistress went to bed, was soon overcome with her fatigue, and dropped asleep; nor did she awaken again until daylight, pouring into her room, told her it must be growing late. She sprang up, and throwing on a dressing-gown, opened the door and looked into the parlour. No one was there, and all was still. Perhaps Sara slept. Ellen knocked at the closed door of the bedroom, and was bidden by a composed but weary voice to come in. She entered, and saw that Sara had never undressed. She had thrown a wrapping gown about her, and was just then seated on a chair beside her bed, which, as Ellen saw with dismay, had not been disturbed. As the woman entered Sara looked at her–her face whiter than ever, her eyes distended, an expression of such blank, utter woe in her whole look and attitude as appalled Ellen, who said in a trembling tone: ‘Child, you promised me to rest!’ ‘Did I, Ellen? Then I forgot it, and if I had remembered, I could not have kept my promise. I could not have lain still for two seconds.’ ‘But, Miss Sara, you’ll make yourself very ill, and you will break my heart.’ ‘Oh, what nonsense!’ she said, with a sound like a little laugh. ‘What is the use of lying down when one can’t sleep. By-and-by I shall be so tired that I can’t help sleeping, and when I feel like that, I will go to bed.’ She folded her hands, and leaned back her head, and there was the same expression upon her face as that which had been there ever since she had given Ellen the little parcel containing Jerome’s ring to post–an expression like the changeless one of some beautiful marble mask from which a pair of restless, wretched human eyes looked forth, haunting all who can read the language they speak. Fear seized Ellen’s heart at the long duration of this strained, unnatural calm. She dreaded the end of it. A terrible vision of her young mistress, with perhaps reason for ever overturned, leading an existence worse than death, occurred to her. ‘I wish he could see her,’ she thought bitterly. ‘It would haunt him to his dying day, and if it drove him mad, it is only what he would deserve. To think of an empty fool like that playing with the heart of a woman like this. ’Tis enough to make one believe there’s nothing but evil to prevail in the world.’