And that night Mrs. Barton slept even more happily, with her mind more completely at rest, than usual; whereas Alice, fevered with doubt and apprehension, lay awake. At seven o'clock she was at her window, watching the grey morning splinter into sunlight over the quiet fields. Through the mist the gamekeeper came, and another man, carrying a woman between them, and the suspicion that her sister might have been killed in an agrarian outrage gripped her heart like an iron hand. She ran downstairs, and, rushing across the gravel, opened the wicket-gate. Olive was moaning with pain, but her moans were a sweet reassurance in Alice's ears, and without attempting to understand the man's story of how Miss Olive had sprained her ankle in crossing the stile in their wood, and how he had found her as he was going his rounds, she gave the man five shillings, thanked him, and sent him away. Barnes and the butler then carried Olive upstairs, and in the midst of much confusion Mr. Barton rode down the avenue in quest of Dr. Reed—galloped down the avenue, his pale hair blowing in the breeze.

'I wish you had come straight to me,' said Mrs. Barton to Alice, as soon as Barnes had left the room. 'We'd have got her upstairs between us, and then we might have told any story we liked about her illness.'

'But the Lawlers' gamekeeper would know all about it.'

'Ah, yes, that's true. I never heard of anything so unfortunate in my life. An elopement is never very respectable, but an elopement that does not succeed, when the girl comes home again, is just as bad as—I cannot think how Olive could have managed to meet Captain Hibbert and arrange all this business, without my finding it out. I feel sure she must have had the assistance of a third party. I feel certain that all this is Barnes's doing. I am beginning to hate that woman, with her perpetual smile, but it won't do to send her away now; we must wait.' And on these words Mrs. Barton approached the bed.

Shaken with sudden fits of shivering, and her teeth chattering, Olive lay staring blindly at her mother and sister. Her eyes were expressive at once of fear and pain.

'And now, my own darling, will you tell me how all this happened?'

'Oh, not now, mother—not now . . . I don't know; I couldn't help it. . . .
You mustn't scold me, I feel too ill to bear it.'

'I am not thinking of scolding you, dearest, and you need not tell me
anything you do not like. . . . I know you were going to run away with
Captain Hibbert, and met with an accident crossing the stile in the
Lawler Wood.'

'Oh, yes, yes; I met that horrid woman, Mrs. Lawler; she knew all about it, and was waiting for me at the stile. She said lots of dreadful things to me . . . I don't remember what; that she had more right to Edward than I—'

'Never mind, dear; don't agitate yourself thinking of what she said.'