‘Winnie,’ I said, ’I will tell you all about myself, but I must hear your story first.  The faster you get on with that the sooner you will hear what I have to tell.’

‘Then I will get on fast,’ said she.  ’After a while my thoughts, as I tossed in my bed, turned from the past to the future.  What was the future that was lying before me?  For months I had evidently been living on the charity of Mr. D’Arcy.  My only excuse for having done so was that I was entirely unconscious of it; but now that I did know the relations between us I must of course end them at once.  But what was I to do?  Whither was I to go?  Besides Miss Dalrymple, whose address I did not know, I had no friends except Sinfi Lovell and the Gypsies and a few Welsh farmers.  To live upon my benefactor’s generous charity now that I was conscious of it was, I felt, impossible.

’I was penniless.  I had not even money to pay my railway fare to any part of England.  There was only one thing for me to do—­write to you.  When I rose in the morning it was with the full determination to write to you at once.  I had been told by Mrs. Titwing that Mr. D’Arcy always breakfasted alone in a little anteroom adjoining his bedroom, and always breakfasted late.  My breakfast, she said, would be prepared in what she called the little green room.  And when I left my bedroom, dressed in a morning dress that was carefully laid out for me, I found the housekeeper moving about in the passages.  She conducted me to the little green room.  On the walls were two looking-glasses in old black oak frames carved with knights at tilt and angels’ heads hovering above them.  Each frame contained two circular mirrors surrounded by painted designs telling the story of the Holy Grail.  The room was furnished with quaint sofas and chairs on which beautiful little old-fashioned designs were painted.  She told me that as I had not named an hour for breakfasting I should have to wait about twenty minutes.

’In one corner of the room was a rather large whatnot, on which lay one or two French novels in green and yellow paper covers and a few daily and weekly newspapers, which I went and turned over.  Among them I was startled to find a paper called the Raxton Gazette.  But I saw at once how it got there, for written on the margin at the top of the paper was the address, “Dr. Mivart, Wimpole Street, London.”  Mr. D’Arcy had told me that the gentleman whose voice I heard behind the screen was the medical man who attended to me during my illness, and it now suddenly flashed upon my mind that at Raxton there was a Dr. Mivart, though I had never seen him during my stay there.  These were, no doubt, one and the same person, and some one from Raxton had posted the newspaper to the doctor’s house in London.

’I looked down the columns of the paper with a very lively interest, and my eye was soon caught by a paragraph encircled by a thick blue pencil mark.  It gave from a paper called the London Satirist what professed to be a long account of you, in which it was said that you were living in a bungalow in Wales with a Gypsy girl.’