"Well, it was a most unaccountable thing. I fancy it troubles Mr. Denison."
"It must trouble all who inhabit Heron Dyke. For myself, I do not think I could bear to live there. Were it my home I should leave it."
Captain Lennox stroked his fair whiskers in surprise.
"Leave it!" he exclaimed. "Leave Heron Dyke!"
"_I_ should. I should be afraid to stay. But then I am a woman, and women are apt to be timorous. If--if Katherine----"
Mrs. Carlyon broke off with a shiver. She rose from her seat and moved away, as though the subject were getting too much for her.
A strange mystery it indeed was, as the reader will admit when he shall hear its particulars later. But it was not the greatest mystery enacted, or to be enacted, at Heron Dyke.
"I have a favour to ask you, Mr. Conroy," began Ella, when they found themselves apart from the rest for a moment.
"You have but to name it," he answered, a smile in his speaking eyes as they glanced into hers.
"Will you let your portfolio remain here until tomorrow? I want to look at the sketches all by myself."
"Very much indeed. How I should like to have been in Paris during that terrible siege!"
"You ought to be thankful that you were a hundred miles away from it."
"But surely I might have been of some sort of use. I could have nursed among the wounded--or helped to distribute food to the starving--or read to the dying. I should have found something to do, and have done it."
"Still, I cannot help saying that you were much better away. You can form but a faint idea of the terror and agony of that awful time."
"But there were women who went through it all, and why should not I have done the same? My life seems so useless--so purposeless. I feel as if I had been sent into a world where there was nothing left for me to do."
"So long as poverty and sickness, want and misery abound, there is surely enough to do for earnest workers of every kind."
"But how to set about doing it? I feel as if my hands were tied, and as if I could not cut the cord that binds me."
"And yet your life is not without its interests. Your uncle, for instance----"
"You have heard about my uncle!" she said, in her quick way, looking at him with a little surprise.
"Yes, I have heard of Mr. Denison, of Heron Dyke. There is nothing very strange in that."