o stop
up here?' she asked, once. 'If it were not for Etta I should like to be
in the drawing-room. But no, that would be an end to our peace.' And here
she looked a little excited. 'But if Giles would let me have a drive.'

I promised to speak to him on the subject of the drive, for I was sure
that he would hail the proposition most gladly as a sign of returning
health; but I told her that in my opinion it would be better for her to
remain quietly in these two pleasant rooms until she was stronger and
more fit to endure the little daily annoyances that are so trying to a
nervous invalid.

'When that time comes you will have to part with your nurse,' I went on,
in a joking tone. But I was grieved to see that at the first hint of my
leaving her she clung to me with the old alarm visible in her manner.

'You must not say that! I cannot part with you, Ursula!' she exclaimed
vehemently. 'If you go, you must take me with you.' And it was some time
before she would let herself be laughed out of her anxious thoughts.

When I revolved all these things in my mind,--her prolonged delicacy and
painful sensitiveness, her aversion to her cousin, and her evident dread
of the future,--I felt that the time had come to seek a more complete
understanding on a point that still perplexed me: I must come to the
bottom of this singular change in her manner to Max. I must know without
doubt and reserve the real state of her feeling with regard to him and
her cousin Claude. If, as I had grown to think during these weeks of
illness, one of these two men, and not Eric, was the chief cause of her
melancholy, I must know which of these two had so agitated her young
life. But in my own mind I never doubted which it was.

This was the difficult task I had set myself, and I felt that it would
not be easy to approach the subject. Gladys was exceedingly reserved,
even with me; it had cost her an effort to speak to me of Eric, and she
had never once mentioned her cousin Captain Hamilton's name.

A woman like Gladys would be extremely reticent on the subject of lovers:
the deeper her feelings, the more she would conceal them. Unlike other
girls, I never heard her speak in the light jesting way with which others
mention a love-affair. She once told me that she considered it far too
sacred and serious to be used as a topic of general conversation. 'People
do not know what they are talking about when they say such things,' she
said, in a moved voice: '