At this point her thoughts
broke off once more, and there was a momentary blank. The next instant
she started up in bed; her heart beating violently, her head whirling
as if she had lost her senses. With electric suddenness her mind pieced
together its scattered multitude of thoughts, and put them before her
plainly under one intelligible form. In the all-mastering agitation of
the moment, she clapped her hands together, and cried out suddenly in
the darkness:
"Miss Vanstone again!!!"
She got out of bed and kindled the light once more. Steady as her nerves
were, the shock of her own suspicion had shaken them. Her firm hand
trembled as she opened her dressing-case and took from it a little
bottle of sal-volatile. In spite of her smooth cheeks and her
well-preserved hair, she looked every year of her age as she mixed the
spirit with water, greedily drank it, and, wrapping her dressing-gown
round her, sat down on the bedside to get possession again of her calmer
self.
She was quite incapable of tracing the mental process which had led her
to discovery. She could not get sufficiently far from herself to see
that her half-formed conclusions on the subject of the Bygraves had
ended in making that family objects of suspicion to her; that the
association of ideas had thereupon carried her mind back to that other
object of suspicion which was represented by the conspiracy against
her master; and that the two ideas of those two separate subjects of
distrust, coming suddenly in contact, had struck the light.
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