Pacing the shrubbery walk at Dallory Hall, a grey woollen shawl wrapped closely round her flowing black silk dress, her pale, sweet, sad face turned up to the lowering sky, was Ellen Adair. The weather, cold and dull, gave signs of approaching winter. The last leaves left on the trees fell fluttering to the earth; the wind, sighing through the bare branches, bore a melancholy sound. All things seemed to speak of death and decay.

This ungenial weather had brought complication with it. Just as Sir Nash Bohun was about to quit Dallory Hall, taking Arthur with him, the wind caught him in an unguarded moment, and laid him up with inflammation of the chest. Sir Nash took to his bed. One of the results was, that Arthur Bohun must remain at the Hall, and knew not how long he might be a fixture there. Sir Nash would not part with him. He had come to regard him quite as his son.

Ellen Adair thought Fate was cruel to her, taking one thing with another. And so it was; very cruel. Whilst they were together, she could not begin to forget him: and, to see him so continually with Mary Dallory, brought her the keenest pain. She was but human: jealousy swayed her just as it sways other people.

Another thing was beginning to trouble her--she did not hear from Mr. Adair. It was very strange. Not a letter had come from him since that containing the permission to marry Arthur Bohun;--as Mrs. Cumberland had interpreted it--received at Eastsea. Ellen could not understand the silence at all. Her father had always written so regularly.

"He ought not to remain here," she murmured passionately as she walked, alluding to Arthur Bohun. "I cannot help myself; I have nowhere else to go: but he ought to leave, in spite of Sir Nash."

A greyer tinge seemed to creep over the sky. The shrubbery seemed to grow darker. It was only the first advent of twilight, falling early that melancholy evening.

"Will there ever be any brightness in my life again?" she continued, clasping her hands in pain. "Is this misery to last for ever? Did any one, I wonder, ever go through such a trial and live? Scarcely. I am afraid I am not very strong to bear things. But oh--who could bear it?"

She sat down on one of the benches, and bent her aching brow on her hands. What with the surrounding gloom, and her dark dress, some one who had turned into the walk, came sauntering on without observing her. It was Arthur Bohun. He started when she raised her head: his face was every whit as pale and sad as hers; but he could not help seeing how ill and woebegone she looked.

"I fear you are not well," he stopped to say.

"Oh--thank you--not very," was the confused answer.

"This is a trying time. Heaven knows I would save you from it, if I could. I would have died to spare you. I would die still, if by that means things for you could be made right. But it may not be. Time alone must be the healer."

He had said this in a somewhat hard tone, as if he were angry with some one or other; perhaps with Fate; and went on his way with a quicker step, leaving never a touch of the hand, never a loving word, never a tender look behind him; just as it had been that day in Dallory Churchyard. Poor girl! her heart felt as though it were breaking there and then.

When the echo of his footsteps had died away, she drew her shawl closer round her slender throat and passed out of the shrubbery. Hovering in a side walk, unseen and unsuspected, was madam. Not often did madam allow herself to be off the watch. She had seen the exit of Captain Bohun; she now saw Ellen\'s; and madam\'s evil spirit rose up within her, and she advanced with a dark frown.

"Have you been walking with Captain Bohun, Miss Adair?"

"No, madam."

"I--thought--I heard him talking to you."

"He came through the shrubbery when I was sitting there, and spoke to me in passing."

"Ah," said madam. "It is well to be careful. Captain Bohun is to marry Miss Dallory: the less any other young woman has to say to him, the better."

To this speech--remarkable as coming from one who professed to be a gentlewoman--Ellen made no reply, saving a bow as she passed onwards, with erect head and self-possessed step, leaving madam to her devices.

She seemed to be tormented on every side. There was no comfort, no solace anywhere. Ellen could have envied Bessy Rane in her grave.

And the farce that had to be kept up before the world. That very evening, as fate had it, Captain Bohun took Miss Adair in to dinner and sat next her, through some well-intentioned blundering of Richard\'s. It had pleased madam to invite seven or eight people; it did not please Mr. North to come in to dinner as he had been expected to do. Richard had to be host, and to take in a stout lady in green velvet, who was to have fallen to his father. There was a moment\'s confusion; madam had gone on; Richard mixed up the wrong people together, and finally said aloud, "Arthur, will you take in Miss Adair?" And so they sat, side by side, and no one observed that they did not converse together, or that anything was wrong. It is curious how long two people may have lived estranged from each other in a household, and the rest suspect it not. Have you over noticed this?--or tried it? It is remarkable, but very true.

After dinner came the drawing-room; and the evening was a more social one than had been known of late. Music, cards, conversation. Young Mr. Ticknell, a relative of the old bankers\' at Whitborough, was there; he had one of the sweetest voices ever given to man, and delighted them with his unaffected singing. One song, that he chose after a few jesting words with Ellen, in allusion to her name, two of them at least had not bargained for. "Ellen Adair." Neither had heard it since that evening at Eastsea; so long past now, in the events that had followed, that it seemed to............