However, it was not, after all, the amorous Mr. Avery who confronted her.  The vestibule held only an ill-dressed young girl, in a gaudy red hat, the sort of looking person who should at most have rung the basement bell, if that:  and she herself seemed to realize this by the guilty little start and tremble she gave when the stately door swung open upon her.  The young mistress of the house eyed her doubtfully.

“Good afternoon.”

“G-good evenin’, ma’am!...”

As she seemed at a loss how to proceed, Carlisle said:  “Yes?  What is it?”

The young person raised a bare hand and brushed it, with a strange gesture, before her eyes.

“Dr. Vivian he told me to give you this note, ma’am.”

She added, as if suddenly moved to destroy a possible impression of Dr. Vivian as a slave-driver, flinging orders this way and that: 

“He’d of brung it himself, on’y I was going walkin’ myself, ma’am, and asked him to leave me take it.”

If the fall was from the height of the securest moment Carlisle had known since her self-betrayal, the more stunning was the impact.  Her heart appeared to abdicate its duties, with one kick; all her being drew together in a knot within her.  It had come, after all.  To run away was well, but she had not run soon enough....

She received the note mechanically, saying:  “Very well.”

“Would you wish me to wait for a nanser, ma’am?  Doctor he didn’t say ...”

In heaven or earth, what answer would she find to this?

“No, you needn’t wait.”

“Do you feel faint, ma’am?”

“Faint?...  No, why should I?”

The young person, convicted of impertinence and silliness besides, turned red, but would not remove her gaze from the lady’s face.

“The—­the heat we been havin’, ma’am.  I don’t know—­it’s so sickenin’, kind of.  I—­I fainted last week, twice, ma’am.”

Something nameless in the little creature’s wide-eyed gaze, timid and yet thrilled, arrested Carlisle in the act of shutting the door upon her.  Was it possible that this singular messenger of Fate had knowledge of the message she brought?

“Why do you stare at me so?”

The girl replied with simplicity: 

“I can’t help it, ma’am, you look so sweet.”

Carlisle leaned against the polished edge of the glass and oak door.  The same chill little hand clenched the unfinished pages to Hugo, and Vivian’s only too fatally finished note.  She perceived who this girl must be, and even in this moment her thought was riveted by the wild suspicion that her secret had already been betrayed.

“You live at the Dabney House, I suppose?—­you’re a buncher at the Works?...  How did you know me—­that this note was for me?”

Here was a puzzler, indeed.  By what instinct had little Kern known, the instant the door began to open, that this, and no other, was Mr. V.V.’s beautiful lady?...