I found myself, at length, almost exhausted, at my noble kinsman's door. I knocked; I asked to see him. The footman did not recognise me. He simply said, looking across the street over my head, with a careless disdain: "I say, what's the row, miss?" Certainly such a visitor as I, and at such an hour, had no very recognisable claim to a ceremonious reception. "Charles," I said, "don't you know me?--Miss Ware." The man started a little, looked hard at me, drew himself up formally, as he made his salutation, receding a step, with the hall-door open in his hand. "Is his lordship at home?" I asked. "No, miss, he dined out to-day." "But I must see him, Charles. If he knew it was I he could not refuse. Tell him mamma is dangerously ill, and I have no one to help me." "He is out, miss; and he sleeps out of town--at Colonel Anson's to-night." I uttered an exclamation of despair. "And when is he to return?" "He will not be in town again for a fortnight, miss; he's going to Harleigh Castle." I stood on the steps for a minute, stunned by the disappointment, staring helplessly into the man's face. "Please, shall I call a cab, miss?" "No--no," I said dreamily. I turned and went away quickly. It troubled me little what the servants might say or think of my strange visit. This blow was distracting. The doctor had distinctly said that mamma's immediate removal to country air was a necessity. As people will under excitement, I was walking at the swiftest pace I could. I was pacing under the evergreens of the neighbouring square, back and forward, again and again; I saw young ladies get from a house opposite into a carriage, and drive away, as I once used to do. I hated them--I hated every one who was as fortunate as I once was. I hated the houses on the other side with their well-lighted halls. I hated even the great prosperous shop-keeping class, with their overgrown persons and purses. Why did not fortune take other people, the purse-proud, the scheming, the vicious, the arrogant, the avaricious, instead of us--drag them from their places, and batter and trundle them in the gutter? Here was I, for no fault--none, none!--reduced to a worse plight than a beggar's. The beggar has been brought up to his calling, and can make something of it; while I could not set about it, had not even that form of pluck which people call meanness, and was quite past the age at which the art is to be learned. All this time I was growing more and more ill. The breathless walking and the angry agitation were precipitating the fever that was already upon me. I had an increasing horror of the dismal abode which was now my home. Distraction like mine demands rapid locomotion as its proper and only anodyne. Despair and quietude quickly subside into madness.