"Trust me to do my best," he said--and,
turning away with a merciful abruptness, left her. In the broad,
cheerful sunshine he had come in to reveal the fatal truth. In the
broad, cheerful sunshine--that truth disclosed--he went out.
CHAPTER XIV.
IT was nearly an hour past noon when Mr. Pendril left the house. Miss
Garth sat down again at the table alone, and tried to face the necessity
which the event of the morning now forced on her.
Her mind was not equal to the effort. She tried to lessen the strain on
it--to lose the sense of her own position--to escape from her thoughts
for a few minutes only. After a little, she opened Mr. Vanstone's
letter, and mechanically set herself to read it through once more.
One by one, the last words of the dead man fastened themselves more
and more firmly on her attention. The unrelieved solitude, the unbroken
silence, helped their influence on her mind and opened it to those very
impressions of past and present which she was most anxious to shun.
As she reached the melancholy lines which closed the letter, she found
herself--insensibly, almost unconsciously, at first--tracing the fatal
chain of events, link by link backward, until she reached its beginning
in the contemplated marriage between Magdalen and Francis Clare.
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