"I can do any commissions that need to be done for you. I have arranged now to stay till the day after to-morrow, and you will be able to tell me all by then," she said quietly, thinking in her own mind that it was probably very well that Winifred was not to return to her self-chosen quarters at all. "The White Weeper must have been very wise not to have prevented the accident, even supposing she could have done so," she thought to herself, while half laughing at her own fancifulness. But the idea suggested a question. "What did make you fall, I wonder?" she said. "Do you think you fainted first, or that the shock of the fall made you faint?" "I don't know," said Winifred. "It was very strange. I was dizzy--that was the sunstroke, I suppose. But I might have had a slight sunstroke without either falling or fainting. I have never fainted before, so I don't know anything about it. But it was very strange. I felt dizzy, as I said, and I was going up the terrace steps--it was _the_ terrace, you know, that runs on to the aspens--when all at once I became icy cold, not cold in myself, but as if something outside me, something coming to me, had made me cold. It was so startling, so extraordinary, that the shock seemed to paralyse me--I felt myself going, and then I must have fallen. The next thing I remember is your face looking at me." "It is strange," said Hertha, "but I do not know much about fainting either." "You see," said Winifred, naively, "I don't think in all my life before I had ever cried so violently, or--or felt so--so unlike myself." "No," agreed Hertha. And in her own mind she said that there are certainly "more things" close about us than we dream of. Who could say if the awakening of Winifred's finer and more perceptive nature might not have begun? Two days later, Miss Norreys found herself in the train on her return journey to London. She was alone this time--she could scarcely believe that barely ten days had passed since the exquisite spring morning when she and Winifred travelled down together to the home Hertha had pictured to herself as so modest, if not humble, an abode. And even now she could not repress a smile at the thought of her own astonishment at the first sight of White Turrets, and her indignation against Winifred. How much seemed to have happened in those few days! It had been to Hertha like the reading of a very interesting book, in which, for the time, her own life and thoughts had been merged. "And not even the ghost story wanting, which is to be found in every orthodox novel nowadays," she thought. "But I am not at the end of my story of real life yet. I have to prepare for pretty Celia coming to me next month, and to settle up Winifred's small affairs. I am sorry for her accident, poor child, but very glad she is not coming up to London just now. It would have been almost impossible to conceal from her the real state of the case."