But under all her gaiety, at moments, too, the dull alarm sounded in her breast; vague warning lest her heart be drifting into deeper currents where perils lay uncharted and unknown.

With every intimate and silent throb of warning she shivered, responsive, masking her growing uncertainty with words.  And all the while, deep in her unfolding soul, she was afraid, afraid.  Not of this man; not of herself as she had been yesterday.  She was afraid of the unknown in her, yet unrevealed, quickening with instincts the parentage of which she knew nothing.  What might be these instincts of inheritance, how ominous their power, their trend, she did not know; from whom inherited she could never, never know.  Would engrafted and acquired instincts aid her; would training control this unknown heritage from a father and a mother whose very existences must always remain without concrete meaning to her?

Since that dreadful day two years ago when a word spoken inadvertently, perhaps maliciously, by Mrs. Van Dieman, made it necessary that she be told the truth; since the dazed horror of that revelation when, beside herself with grief and shame, she had turned blindly to herself for help; and, childish impulse answering, had hurled her into folly unutterable, she had, far in the unlighted crypt of her young soul, feared this unknown sleeping self, its unfolded intelligence, its passions unawakened.

Through many a night, wet-eyed in darkness, she had wondered whose blood it was that flowed so warmly in her veins; what inherited capacity for good and evil her soul and body held; whose eyes she had; whose hair, and skin, and hands, and who in the vast blank world had given colour to these eyes, this skin and hair, and shaped her fingers, her mouth, her limbs, the delicate rose-tinted nails whitening in the clinched palm as she lay there on her bed at night awake.

The darkness was her answer.

And thinking of these things she sighed unconsciously.

“What is it, Shiela?” he asked.

“Nothing; I don’t know—­the old pain, I suppose.”

“Pain?” he repeated anxiously.

“No; only apprehension.  You know, don’t you?  Well, then, it is nothing; don’t ask me.”  And, noting the quick change in his face—­“No, no; it is not what you think.  How quickly you are hurt!  My apprehension is not about you; it concerns myself.  And it is quite groundless.  I know what I must do; I know!” she repeated bitterly.  “And there will always be a straight path to the end; clear and straight, until I go out as nameless as I came in to all this....  Don’t touch my hand, please....  I’m trying to think....  I can’t, if we are in contact....  And you don’t know who you are touching; and I can’t tell you.  Only two in all the world, if they are alive, could tell you.  And they never will tell you—­or tell me—­why they left me here alone.”

With a little shiver she released her hand, looking straight ahead of her for a few moments, then, unconsciously up into the blue overhead.