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Ailsa stood there with a feeling that the events of the night were not yet over. She had forgotten pretty well everything besides the fact that Ronald Braybrooke was dead. The news had been a great shock, and it had left a dull aching pain behind. Ailsa's mind had travelled rapidly back over the bridge of years to the time when she had been continually happy in her country home-life before her father died and left her to the care of Mr. Colville. Those had been happy days indeed, for Mr. Lefroy had been a dreamer and scholar, and he had been in the habit of leaving his sixteen-year-old daughter very much to herself.
Hence the great intimacy which had grown up between the girl and Ronald Braybrooke. Ailsa had always looked upon him as her beau-ideal of what a man should be; from a child she had unconsciously loved him. Perhaps she had not known it then, but she did now.