'Does she know?' asked Lady Wantley slowly, searchingly.

'Oh no!' he said, in almost a whisper, and glancing apprehensively round the room as he did so, but only to be made aware that they were indeed alone.

Then, very deliberately, the young man drew up a chair close to hers. 'Has not the time now come when you should try and forget? Surely you should try and put the past out of your mind, if only for Penelope's sake?'

'Ah,' she said very plaintively, 'but I cannot forget! I am not allowed to do so. When I lie down I say, "When shall I arise and the night be gone?" And I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day.'

'Yet you felt justified in your action—above all, you did save Penelope,' he urged in a low tone.

But Lady Wantley turned on him a look of anguish and perplexity.

'Surely,' he added earnestly, 'surely you do not allow yourself to doubt that Penelope was saved—and saved, I am convinced, from what would have been a frightful fate, by your action?'

'I do not know,' she said feebly. 'Part of my punishment has been the doubt, the awful doubt, as to whether we were justified in our fears. If I gave my soul for hers, I am more than content to be marked with the mark of the Beast. For, Ludovic, they that dwell in mine house and my maids count me for a stranger; I am an alien in their sight.'

Her words, their hopelessness, moved him to great pity. 'Why did you not ask us to come before?' he asked. 'We would have done so willingly, and then you would not have felt so sadly lonely.'

Lady Wantley looked at him fixedly. 'If they, my father and my husband, have forsaken me,' she said slowly,'I am not fit for other company. In my great distress, in my extreme abasement, only my mother has remained faithful; she alone has had the courage to descend with me into the Pit. My kinsfolk have failed and my familiar friends have forgotten me. You know—you remember, Ludovic, that he—my husband, I mean—never left me. For nearly fifty years we were together, inseparable—forty years in the flesh, ten years in the spirit; where he went I followed; where I chose to go he accompanied me, and guarded me from trouble. But now,' she said—and, oh! so woefully—'I have not felt his presence, or heard his voice, for upwards of a year.'