“Then you, too, have known the secret, and have said nothing about it?  You, too, have been aware of the violence which took place at that midnight meeting?  You have been aware of what befell your cousin, the man to whom you were all but engaged.  And you have held your tongue at the instigation, no doubt, of Mr. Henry Annesley.  Oh, Florence, you also will find yourself in the hands of the policeman!” At this moment the fly drew up at the door of the house in Montpelier Place, and the two ladies had to get out and walk up the steps into the hall, where they were congratulated on their early return from the party by the lady’s-maid.

“Mamma, I will go to bed,” said Florence, as soon as she reached her mother’s room.

“I think you had better, my dear, though Heaven knows what disturbances there may be during the night.”  By this Mrs. Mountjoy had intended to imply that Prodgers, the policeman, might probably lose not a moment more before he would at once proceed to arrest Miss Mountjoy for the steps she had taken in regard to the disappearance of Captain Scarborough.

She had heard from Harry Annesley the fact that he had been brutally attacked by the captain in the middle of the night in the streets of London; and for this, in accordance with her mother’s theory, she was to be dragged out of bed by a constable, and that, probably, before the next morning should have come.  There was something in this so ludicrous as regarded the truth of the story, and yet so cruel as coming from her mother, that Florence hardly knew whether to cry or laugh as she laid her head upon the pillow.

But in the morning, as she was thinking that the facts of her own position had still to be explained to her mother,—­that it would be necessary that she should declare her purpose and the impossibility of change, now that she had once pledged herself to her lover,—­Mrs. Mountjoy came into the room, and stood at her bedside, with that appearance of ghostly displeasure which always belongs to an angry old lady in a night-cap.

“Well, mamma?”

“Florence, there must be an understanding between us.”

“I hope so.  I thought there always had been.  I am sure, mamma, you have known that I have never liked Captain Scarborough so as to become his wife, and I think you have known that I have liked Harry Annesley.”

“Likings are all fiddlesticks!”

“No, mamma; or, if you object to the word, I will say love.  You have known that I have not loved my cousin, and that I have loved this other man.  That is not nonsense; that at any rate is a stern reality, if there be anything real in the world.”

“Stern! you may well call it stern.”

“I mean unbending, strong, not to be overcome by outside circumstances.  If Mr. Annesley had not spoken to me as he did last night,—­could never have so spoken to me,—­I should have been a miserable girl, but my love for him would have been just as stern.  I should have remained and thought of it, and have been unhappy through my whole life.  But he has spoken, and I am exultant.  That is what I mean by stern.  All that is most important, at any rate to me.”