As soon as the candle was out, the darkness seemed to communicate some
inexplicable perversity to her thoughts. They wandered back from present
things to past, in spite of her. They brought her old master back to
life again; they revived forgotten sayings and doings in the English
circle at Zurich; they veered away to the old man's death-bed at
Brighton; they moved from Brighton to London; they entered the bare,
comfortless room at Vauxhall Walk; they set the Aquarium back in its
place on the kitchen table, and put the false Miss Garth in the chair
by the side of it, shading her inflamed eyes from the light; they placed
the anonymous letter, the letter which glanced darkly at a conspiracy,
in her hand again, and brought her with it into her master's presence;
they recalled the discussion about filling in the blank space in the
advertisement, and the quarrel that followed when she told Noel Vanstone
that the sum he had offered was preposterously small; they revived an
old doubt which had not troubled her for weeks past--a doubt whether the
threatened conspiracy had evaporated in mere words, or whether she and
her master were likely to hear of it again.
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