Colonel would have to do something--that was the only way out of it.

What really happened Adela never quite understood; what seemed to be
happening was that the room went round and round. Through the blur
of perception accompanying this effect the sharp stabs of her
visitor's revelation came to her like the words heard by a patient
"going off" under ether. She afterwards denied passionately even to
herself that she had done anything so abject as to faint; but there
was a lapse in her consciousness on the score of Miss Flynn's
intervention. This intervention had evidently been active, for when
they talked the matter over, later in the day, with bated breath and
infinite dissimulation for the school-room quarter, the governess had
more lurid truths, and still more, to impart than to receive. She
was at any rate under the impression that she had athletically
contended, in the drawing-room, with the yellow hair--this after
removing Adela from the scene and before inducing Mrs. Godfrey to
withdraw. Miss Flynn had never known a more thrilling day, for all
the rest of it too was pervaded with agitations and conversations,
precautions and alarms. It was given out to Beatrice and Muriel that
their sister had been taken suddenly ill, and the governess
ministered to her in her room. Indeed Adela had never found herself
less at ease, for this time she had received a blow that she couldn't
return. There was nothing to do but to take it, to endure the
humiliation of her wound.

At first she declined to take it--having, as might appear, the much
more attractive resource of regarding her visitant as a mere
masquerading person, an impudent impostor. On the face of the matter
moreover it wasn't fair to believe till one heard; and to hear in
such a case was to hear Godfrey himself. Whatever she had tried to