nk she did say something
to Desmond.'

'Desmond!' cried Elizabeth under her breath. She turned slowly, and
went away, leaving Mrs. Gaddesden panting and a little scared at
what she had done.

Elizabeth went back to the library, where there was much to put in
order. She forced herself to tidy the Squire's table, and to write a
business letter or two. But when that was done she dropped her face
in her hands, and shed a few very bitter tears.

She seemed to herself to have failed miserably. In truth, her heart
clung to all these people. She soon attached herself to those with
whom she lived, and was but little critical of them. The warm,
maternal temper which went with her shrewd brain seemed to need
perpetually objects on which to spend itself. She could have loved
the twins dearly had they let her, and day by day, in the absence of
the mother, she had been accustomed to nurse, she had even
positively enjoyed 'petting' Mrs. Gaddesden, holding her wool for
her, seeing to her hot-water bottles, and her breakfast in bed.

Pamela in love with Arthur Chicksands! And she remembered that a
faint idea of it had once crossed her mind, only to be entirely
dismissed and forgotten.

'But I ought to have seen--I ought to have known! Am I really a
vampire?'

And she remembered how she, in her first youth, had suffered from
the dominance and the accomplishment of older women; women who gave
a girl no chance, who must have all the admiration, and all the
opportunities, who would coolly and cruelly snatch a girl's lover
from her.

'And that's how I've appeared to Pamela!' thought Elizabeth between
laughing and crying. 'Yet all I did was to talk about ash for
aeroplanes! Oh, you poor child--you poor child!'

She seemed to feel Pamela's pain in her own heart--she who had had
love and lost it.

'Am I just an odious, clever woman?' She sat down and hated herself.
All the passing vanity that had been stirred in her by Sir Henry's
compliments, all the natural pleasure she had taken in the success
of her great adventure as a business woman, in the ease with which
she, the Squire's paid secretary, had lately begun to lead the
patriotic effort of an English county--how petty, how despicable
even, it seemed, in presence of a boy who had given his all!--even
beside a girl in love!

And the Squire--'Was I hard to him too?'

The night came down. All the strange or beautiful shapes in the
library wavered and flickered under the firelig