“Intolerable!” exclaimed the Colonel.  “She was improving under Bessie’s influence, but she has broken out worse than ever.  ’Journal of Female Industry!’ ‘Journal of a Knight of Industry,’ might be a better title.  You will have nothing to do with it, Ermine?”

“Certainly not as the ‘Invalid,’ but I owe her something for having let her run into this scrape before you.”

“As if you could have hindered her!  Come, don’t waste time and brains on a companion for Curatocult.”

“You make me so idle and frivolous that I shall be expelled from the ‘Traveller,’ and obliged to take refuge in the ’Female Industry Journal.’  Shall you distribute the prospectuses?”

“I shall give one to Bessie!  That is if I go at all.”

“No, no, there is no valid reason for staying away.  Even if we were sure that Rose was right, nothing could well come of it, and your absence would be most invidious.”

“I believe I am wanted to keep Master Alick in order, but if you have the least feeling that you would be more at ease with me at home—­”

“That is not a fair question,” said Ermine, smiling.  “You know very well that you ought to go.”

“And I shall try to bring back Harry Beauchamp,” added the Colonel.  “He would be able to identify the fellow.”

“I do not know what would be gained by that.”

“I should know whom to watch.”

Ermine had seen so much of Rose’s nervous timidity, and had known so many phantoms raised by it, that she attached little importance to the recognition, and when she went over the matter with her little niece, it was with far more thought of the effect of the terror, and of the long suppressed secret, upon the child’s moral and physical nature, than with any curiosity as to the subject of her last alarm.  She was surprised to observe that Alison was evidently in a state of much more restlessness and suspense than she was conscious of in herself, during Colin’s absence, and attributed this to her sister’s fear of Maddox’s making some inroad upon her in her long solitary hours, in which case she tried to reassure her by promises to send at once for Mr. Mitchell or for Coombe.

Alison let these assurances be given to her, and felt hypocritical for receiving them in silence.  Her grave set features had tutored themselves to conceal for ever one page in the life that Ermine thought was entirely revealed to her.  Never had Ermine known that brotherly companionship had once suddenly assumed the unwelcome aspect of an affection against which Alison’s heart had been steeled by devotion to the sister whose life she had blighted.  Her resolution had been unswerving, but its full cost had been unknown to her, till her adherence to it had slackened the old tie of hereditary friendship towards others of her family; and even when marriage should have obliterated the past, she still traced resentment in the hard judgment of her brother’s conduct, and even in the one act of consideration that it galled her to accept.