She was not
able to reason back in this way from the effect to the cause. She could
only feel that the suspicion had become more than a suspicion already:
conviction itself could not have been more firmly rooted in her mind.
Looking back at Magdalen by the new light now thrown on her, Mrs.
Lecount would fain have persuaded herself that she recognized some
traces left of the false Miss Garth's face and figure in the graceful
and beautiful girl who had sat at her master's table hardly an hour
since--that she found resemblances now, which she had never thought of
before, between the angry voice she had heard in Vauxhall Walk and the
smooth, well-bred tones which still hung on her ears after the evening's
experience downstairs. She would fain have persuaded herself that she
had reached these results with no undue straining of the truth as she
really knew it, but the effort was in vain.
Mrs. Lecount was not a woman to waste time and thought in trying to
impose on herself. She accepted the inevitable conclusion that the
guesswork of a moment had led her to discovery. And, more than that, she
recognized the plain truth--unwelcome as it was--that the conviction now
fixed in her own mind was thus far unsupported by a single fragment of
producible evidence to justify it to the minds of others.
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