Having disclosed these particulars, Mrs. Vanstone requested that they
might be kept a secret between her correspondent and herself. She had
felt unwilling to mention her suspicions to Miss Garth, until those
suspicions had been confirmed--and she now recoiled, with even greater
reluctance, from allowing her daughters to be in any way alarmed about
her. It would be best to dismiss the subject for the present, and to
wait hopefully till the summer came. In the meantime they would all, she
trusted, be happily reunited on the twenty-third of the month, which Mr.
Vanstone had fixed on as the day for their return. With this intimation,
and with the customary messages, the letter, abruptly and confusedly,
came to an end.
For the first few minutes, a natural sympathy for Mrs. Vanstone was the
only feeling of which Miss Garth was conscious after she had laid the
letter down. Ere long, however, there rose obscurely on her mind a doubt
which perplexed and distressed her. Was the explanation which she had
just read really as satisfactory and as complete as it professed to be?
Testing it plainly by facts, surely not.
On the morning of her departure, Mrs.
Pages:
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56