"That's it, my lord, is it? Where was I?--oh, Sir Pitt Crawley...." And then the reading was continued, till tea portended, and Irene went away to capture her visitors. All the sting of his darkness came upon him in its fulness as he heard that voice on the stairs. Oh, could he but see her for one moment--only one moment--to be sure that that dazzling image of three weeks since was not a mere imagination! He knew well the enchantment of the rainbow gleam on sea and earth and sky--the glory that makes Aladdin's palace of the merest hovel. He could scarcely have said to a nicety why a self-deception on this score seemed to him fraught with such evil. If it was a terror on Gwen's behalf, that a false image cherished through a period of reviving eyesight should in the end prove an injustice to her, and cast a chill over his own passionate admiration--for it was that at least that a chance of five minutes had enthralled him with--he banished that terror artificially from his mind. What could it matter to _her_, if he _was_ taken aback and disappointed at her not turning out what his excited fancy had made her that evening at Arthur's Bridge? What was he to _her_ that any chance man might not have been, after so scanty an interchange of words? That was his dominant feeling, or underlying it, as her voice neared the door of his room, saying:--"Fancy your carrying him away without our seeing him--so much as thinking of it! I call you a wicked, unprincipled sister." To which another voice, a maternal sort of voice, said what must have been: "Don't speak so loud!"--or its equivalent. For the girl's voice dropped, her last words being:--"_He_ won't hear, at this distance." Then, she was actually coming in at the door! He could hear the prodigious skirt-rustle that is now a thing of womanhood's past--though we adored every comely example, mind you, we oldsters in those days, for all that she carried a milliner's shop on her back--and as it climaxed towards entry had to remember by force how slight indeed had been his interchange of words with the visitor he wished to see--to see by hearing, and to touch the hand of twice. For he had counted his coming privileges in his heart already, even if his reason had made light of its arithmetic. He would be on the safe side now--so he said to himself--and think of the elder lady as the player of the leading _role_. No disparagement to her subordinate; the merest deference to convention! There was no mishap about the first meeting; only a narrow escape of one. The man in the dark reckoned it safest to extend his hand and leave it, to await the first claimant. He took for granted this would be the mother, and as his hand closed on a lady's, not small enough to call his assumption in question, said half interrogatively:--"Lady Ancester?" "That's Gwen," said his sister's voice. And at the word an electric shock of a sort passed up his arm, the hand that still held his showing no marked alacrity to release it.