“Your mamma’s not well, Barbara.”

“Is she not?” cried Barbara, with quick concern.  “I must go and see her.”

“She has had one of those ridiculous dreams again,” pursued Miss Carlyle, ignoring the presence of the governess and Lucy.  “I was sure of it by her very look when I got in, shivering and shaking, and glancing fearfully around, as if she feared a dozen spectres were about to burst out of the walls.  So I taxed her with it, and she could make no denial.  Richard is in some jeopardy, she protests, or will be.  And there she is, shaking still, although I told her that people who put faith in dreams were only fit for a lunatic asylum.”

Barbara looked distressed.  She did not believe in dreams any more than Miss Carlyle, but she could not forget how strangely peril to Richard had supervened upon some of these dreams.

“I will go in now and see mamma,” she said.  “If you are returning home, Cornelia, Madame Vine can walk with you, and wait for me there.”

“Let me go in with you, mamma!” pleaded Lucy.

Barbara mechanically took the child’s hand.  The gates closed on them, and Miss Carlyle and Lady Isabel proceeded in the direction of the town.  But not far had they gone when, in turning a corner, the wind, which was high, blew away with the veil of Lady Isabel, and, in raising her hand in trepidation to save it before it was finally gone, she contrived to knock off her blue spectacles.  They fell to the ground, and were broken.

“How did you manage that?” uttered Miss Carlyle.

How, indeed?  She bent her face on the ground, looking at the damage.  What should she do?  The veil was over the hedge, the spectacles were broken—­how could she dare show her naked face?  That face was rosy just then, as in former days, the eyes were bright, and Miss Carlyle caught their expression, and stared in very amazement.

“Good heavens above,” she uttered, “what an extraordinary likeness!” And Lady Isabel’s heart turned faint and sick within her.

Well it might.  And, to make matters worse, bearing down right upon them, but a few paces distant, came Sir Francis Levison.

Would he recognize her?

Standing blowing in the wind at the turning of the road were Miss Carlyle and Lady Isabel Vane.  The latter, confused and perplexed, was picking up the remnant of her damaged spectacles; the former, little less perplexed, gazed at the face which struck upon her memory as being so familiar.  Her attention, however, was called off the face to the apparition of Sir Francis Levison.

He was close upon them, Mr. Drake and the other comrade being with him, and some tagrag in attendance, as usual.  It was the first time he and Miss Carlyle had met face to face.  She bent her condemning brow, haughty in its bitter scorn, full upon him, for it was not in the nature of Miss Carlyle to conceal her sentiments, especially when they were rather of the strongest.  Sir Francis, when he arrived opposite, raised his hat to her.  Whether it was done in courtesy, in confused unconsciousness, or in mockery, cannot be told.  Miss Carlyle assumed it to have been the latter, and her lips, in their anger grew almost as pale as those of the unhappy woman who was cowering behind her.