How much the sisters slept they did not confide to one another, but

when they rose, Alison shook her head at her sister's heavy eyelids,

and Ermine retorted with a reproachful smile at certain dark tokens of

sleeplessness under Alison's eyes.

"No, not the flowered flimsiness, please," she said, in the course of

her toilette, "let me have the respectable grey silk." And next she

asked for a drawer, whence she chose a little Nuremberg horn brooch for

her neck. "I know it is very silly," she said, "but I can't quite help

it. Only one question, Ailie, that I thought of too late. Did he hear

your name?"

"I think not, Lady Temple named nobody. But why did you not ask me last

night?"

"I thought beginning to talk again would destroy your chance of sleep,

and we had resolved to stop."

"And, Ermine, if it be, what shall I do?"

"Do as you feel right at the moment," said Ermine, after a moment's

pause. "I cannot tell how it may be. I have been thinking over what you

told me about the Major and Lady Temple."

"Oh, Ermine, what a reproof this is for that bit of gossip."

"Not at all, my dear, the warning may be all the better for me," said

Ermine, with a voice less steady than her words. "It is not what, under

the circumstances, I could think likely in the Colin whom I knew; but

were it indeed so, then, Ailie, you had better say nothing about me,

unless he found you out. We would get employment elsewhere."

"And I must leave you to the suspense all day."

"Much better so. The worst thing we could do would be to go on talking

about it. It is far better for me to be left with my dear little

unconscious companion."

Alison tried to comfort herself with this belief through the long hours

of the morning, during which she only heard that mamma and Colonel Keith

were gone to the Homestead, and she saw no one till she came forth with

her troop to the midday meal.

And there, at sight of Lady Temple's content and calm, satisfied look,

as though she were once more in an accustomed atmosphere, and felt

herself and the boys protected, and of the Colonel's courteous attention

to her and affectionate authority towards her sons, it was an absolute

pang to recognise the hue of eye described by Ermine; but still Alison

tried to think them generic Keith eyes, till at length, amid the merry

chatter of her pupils, came an appeal to "Miss Williams," and then came

a look that thrilled through her, the same glance that she had met for

one terrible moment twelve years before, and renewing the same longing

to shrink from all sight or sound. How she kept her seat and continued

to attend to the children she never knew, but the voices sounded like

a distant Babel; and she did not know whether she were most relieved,

disappointed, or indignant when she left the dining-room to take the

boys for their walk. Oh, that Ermine could be hid from all knowledge

of what would be so much harder to bear than the death in which she had

long believed!




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