No. 34.] SATURDAY,
DECEMBER 17, 1859
[PRICE 2d.
THE WOMAN IN WHITE.
———•———
HARTRIGHT'S NARRATIVE CONTINUED.
VIII.
So ended my eventful first day at Limmeridge House.
Miss Halcombe and I kept our secret. After the discovery of the likeness no
fresh light seemed destined to break over the mystery of the woman in white. At
the first safe opportunity Miss Halcombe cautiously led her half-sister to speak
of their mother, of old times, and of Anne Catherick. Miss Fairlie's
recollections of the little scholar at Limmeridge were, however, only of the
most vague and general kind. She remembered the likeness between herself and her
mother's favourite pupil, as something which had been supposed to exist in past
times; but she did not refer to the gift of the white dresses, or to the
singular form of words in which the child had artlessly expressed her gratitude
for them. She remembered that Anne had remained at Limmeridge for a few months
only, and had then left it to go back to her home in Hampshire; but she could
not say whether the mother and daughter had ever returned, or had ever been
heard of afterwards. No further search, on Miss Halcombe's part, through the few
letters of Mrs. Fairlie's writing which she had left unread, assisted in
clearing up the uncertainties still left to perplex us. We had identified the
unhappy woman whom I had met in the night-time, with Anne Catherick — we had
made some advance, at least, towards connecting the probably defective condition
of the poor creature's intellect with the peculiarity of her being dressed all
in white, and with the continuance, in her maturer years, of her childish
gratitude towards Mrs. Fairlie — and there, so far as we knew at that time, our
discoveries had ended.
The days passed on, the weeks passed on; and the track of the golden autumn
wound its bright way visibly through the green summer of the trees. Peaceful,
fast-flowing, happy time! my story glides by you now, as swiftly as you once
glided by me. Of all the treasures of enjoyment that you poured so freely into
my heart, how much is left me that has purpose and value enough to be written on
this page? Nothing but the saddest of all confessions that a man can make — the
confession of his own folly.
The secret which that confession discloses should be told with little effort,
for it has indirectly escaped me already. The poor weak words which have failed
to describe Miss Fairlie, have succeeded in betraying the sensations she
awakened in me. It is so with us all. Our words are giants when they do us an
injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.
I loved her.
Ah! how well I know all the sadness and all the mockery that is contained in
those three words. I can sigh over my mournful confession with the tenderest
woman who reads it and pities me. I can laugh at it as bitterly as the hardest
man who tosses it from him in contempt. I loved her! Feel for me, or despise me,
I confess it with the same immovable resolution to own the truth.
Was there no excuse for me? There was some excuse to be found, surely, in the
conditions under which my term of hired service was passed at Limmeridge House.
My morning hours succeeded each other calmly in the quiet and seclusion of my
own room. I had just work enough to do, in mounting my employer's drawings, to
keep my hands and eyes pleasurably employed, while my mind was left free to
enjoy the dangerous luxury of its own unbridled thoughts. A perilous solitude,
for it lasted long enough to enervate, not long enough to fortify me. A perilous
solitude, for it was followed by afternoons and evenings spent, day after day
and week after week, alone in the society of two women, one of whom possessed
all the accomplishments of grace, wit, and high-breeding, the other all the
charms of beauty, gentleness, and simple truth, that can purify and subdue the
heart of man. Not a day passed, in that dangerous intimacy of teacher and pupil,
in which my hand was not close to Miss Fairlie's; my cheek, as we bent together
over her sketch-book, almost touching hers. The more attentively she watched
every movement of my brush, the more closely I was breathing the perfume of her
hair, and the warm fragrance of her breath. It was part of my service, to live in
the very light of her eyes — at one time to be bending over her, so close to
her bosom as to tremble at the thought of touching it; at another, to feel her
bending over me, bending so close to see what I was about, that her voice sank
low when she spoke to me, and her ribbons brushed my cheek in the wind before
she could draw them back.
The evenings which followed the sketching excursions of the afternoon, varied,
rather than checked, these innocent, these inevitable familiarities. My natural
fondness for the music which she played with such tender feeling, such delicate
womanly taste, and her natural enjoyment of giving me back, by the practice of
her art, the pleasure which I had offered to her by the practice of mine, only
wove another tie which drew us closer and closer to one another. The accidents
of conversation; the simple habits which regulated even such a little thing as
the position of our places at table; the play of Miss Halcombe's ever-ready
raillery, always directed against my anxiety, as teacher, while it sparkled over
her enthusiasm as pupil; the harmless expression of poor Mrs. Vesey's drowsy
approval which connected Miss Fairlie and me as two model young people who never
disturbed her — every one of these trifles, and many more, combined to fold us
together in the same domestic atmosphere, and to lead us both insensibly to the
same hopeless end.
I should have remembered my position, and have put myself secretly on my guard.
I did so; but not till it was too late. All the discretion, all the experience,
which had availed me with other women, and secured me against other temptations,
failed me with her. It had been my profession, for years past, to be in this
close contact with young girls of all ages, and of all orders of beauty. I had
accepted the position as part of my calling in life; I had trained myself to
leave all the sympathies natural to my age in my employer's outer hall, as
coolly as I left my umbrella there before I went up-stairs. I had long since
learnt to understand, composedly and as a matter of course, that my situation in
life was considered a guarantee against any of my female pupils feeling more
than the most ordinary interest in me, and that I was admitted among beautiful
and captivating women, much as a harmless domestic animal is admitted among
them. This guardian experience I had gained early; this guardian experience had
sternly and strictly guided me straight along my own poor narrow path, without
once letting me stray aside, to the right hand or to the left. And now, I and my
trusty talisman were parted for the first time. Yes, my hardly-earned
self-control was as completely lost to me as if I had never possessed it; lost
to me, as it is lost every day to other men, in other critical situations, where
women are concerned. I know, now, that I should have questioned myself from the
first. I should have asked why any room in the house was better than home to me
when she entered it, and barren as a desert when she went out again — why I
always noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I had noticed
and remembered in no other woman's before — why I saw her, heard her, and
touched her (when we shook hands at night and morning) as I had never seen,
heard, and touched any other woman in my life? I should have looked into my own
heart, and found this new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it
was young. Why was this easiest, simplest work of self-culture always too much
for me? The explanation has been written already in the three words that were
many enough, and plain enough, for my confession. I loved her.
The days passed, the weeks passed; it was approaching the third month of my stay
in Cumberland. The delicious monotony of life in our calm seclusion, flowed on
with me like a smooth stream with a swimmer who glides down the current. All
memory of the past, all thought of the future, all sense of the falseness and
hopelessness of my own position, lay hushed within me into deceitful rest.
Lulled by the Syren-song that my own heart sung to me, with eyes shut to all
sight, and ears closed to all sound of danger, I drifted nearer and nearer to
the fatal rocks. The warning that aroused me at last, and startled me into
sudden, self-accusing consciousness of my own weakness, was the plainest, the
truest, the kindest of all warnings, for it came silently from
her.
We had parted one night, as usual. No word had fallen from my lips, at that time
or at any time before it, that could betray me, or startle her into sudden
knowledge of the truth. But, when we met again in the morning, a change had come
over her — a change that told me all.
I shrank then — I shrink still — from invading the innermost sanctuary of her
heart, and laying it open to others, as I have laid open my own. Let it be
enough to say that the time when she first surprised my secret, was, I firmly
believe, the time when she first surprised her own, and the time, also, when she
changed towards me in the interval of one night. Her nature, too truthful to
deceive others, was too noble to deceive itself. When the doubt that I had
hushed asleep, first laid its weary weight on her heart, the true face owned
all, and said, in its own frank simple language — I am sorry for him; I am
sorry for myself.
It said this, and more, which I could not then interpret. I understood but too
well the change in her manner, to greater kindness and quicker readiness in
interpreting all my wishes, before others — to constraint and sadness, and
nervous anxiety to absorb herself in the first occupation she could seize on,
whenever we happened to be left together alone. I understood why the sweet
sensitive lips smiled so rarely and so restrainedly now and why the clear blue
eyes looked at me, sometimes with the pity of an angel, sometimes with the
innocent perplexity of a child. But the change meant more than this. There was a
coldness in her hand, there was an unnatural immobility in her face, there was
in all her movements the mute expression of constant fear and clinging
self-reproach. The sensations that I could trace to herself and to me, the
unacknowledged sensations that we were feeling in common, were not these. There
were certain elements of the change in her that were still secretly drawing us
together, and others that were, as secretly, beginning to drive us apart.
In my doubt and perplexity, in my vague suspicion of something hidden which I
was left to find by my own unaided efforts, I examined Miss Halcombe's looks and
manner for enlightenment. Living in such intimacy as ours, no serious alteration
could take place in any one of us which did not sympathetically affect the
others. The change in Miss Fairlie was reflected in her half-sister. Although
not a word escaped Miss Halcombe which hinted at an altered state of feeling
towards myself, her penetrating eyes had contracted a new habit of always
watching me. Sometimes, the look was like suppressed anger; sometimes, like
suppressed dread; sometimes, like neither — like nothing, in short, which I
could understand. A week elapsed, leaving us all three still in this position of
secret constraint towards one another. My situation, aggravated by the sense of
my own miserable weakness and forgetfulness of myself, now too late awakened in
me, was becoming intolerable. I felt that I must cast off the oppression under
which I was living, at once and for ever — yet how to act for the best, or what
to say first, was more than I could tell.
From this position of helplessness and humiliation, I was rescued by Miss
Halcombe. Her lips told me the bitter, the necessary, the unexpected truth; her
hearty kindness sustained me under the shock of hearing it; her sense and
courage turned to its right use an event which threatened the worst that could
happen, to me and to others, in Limmeridge House.
IX.
It was on a Thursday in the week, and nearly at the end of the third month of my
sojourn in Cumberland.
In the morning, when I went down into the breakfast-room, at the usual hour,
Miss Halcombe, for the first time since I had known her, was absent from her
customary place at the table.
Miss Fairlie was out on the lawn. She bowed to me, but did not come in. Not a
word had dropped from my lips or from hers that could unsettle either of us —
and yet the same unacknowledged sense of embarrassment made us shrink alike from
meeting one another alone. She waited on the lawn; and I waited in the
breakfast-room, till Mrs. Vesey or Miss Halcombe came in. How quickly I should
have joined her; how readily we should have shaken hands, and glided into our
customary talk, only a fortnight ago!
In a few minutes, Miss Halcombe entered. She had a preoccupied look, and she
made her apologies for being late, rather absently.
"I have been detained," she said, "by a consultation with Mr. Fairlie on a
domestic matter which he wished to speak to me about."
Miss Fairlie came in from the garden; and the usual morning greeting passed
between us. Her hand struck colder to mine than ever. She did not look at me;
and she was very pale. Even Mrs. Vesey noticed it, when she entered the room a
moment after.
"I suppose it's the change in the wind," said the old lady. "The winter is
coming — ah, my love, the winter is coming soon!"
In her heart and in mine it had come already!
Our morning meal — once so full of pleasant good-humoured discussions of the
plans for the day —was short and silent. Miss Fairlie seemed to feel the
oppression of the long pauses in the conversation; and looked appealingly to her
sister to fill them up. Miss Halcombe, after once or twice hesitating and
checking herself, in a most uncharacteristic manner, spoke at last.
"I have seen your uncle this morning, Laura," she said. "He thinks the purple
room is the one that ought to be got ready; and he confirms what I told you.
Monday is the day — not Tuesday."
While these words were being spoken, Miss Fairlie looked down at the table
beneath her. Her fingers moved nervously among the crumbs that were scattered on
the cloth. The paleness on her cheeks spread to her lips, and the lips
themselves trembled visibly. I was not the only person present who noticed this.
Miss Halcombe saw it, too; and at once set us the example of rising from table.
Mrs. Vesey and Miss Fairlie left the room together. The kind sorrowful blue eyes
looked at me, for a moment, with the prescient sadness of a coming and a long
farewell. I felt the answering pang in my own heart — the pang that told me I
must lose her soon, and love her the more unchangeably for the loss.
I turned towards the garden, when the door had closed on her. Miss Halcombe was
standing with her hat in her hand, and her shawl over her arm, by the large
window that led out to the lawn, and was looking at me attentively.
"Have you any leisure time to spare," she asked, "before you begin to work in
your own room?"
"Certainly, Miss Halcombe. I have always time at your service."
"I want to say a word to you in private, Mr. Hartright. Get your hat, and come
out into the garden. We are not likely to be disturbed there at this hour in the
morning."
As we stepped out on to the lawn, one of the under-gardeners — a mere lad —
passed us on his way to the house, with a letter in his hand. Miss Halcombe
stopped him.
"Is that letter for me?" she asked.
"Nay, miss; it's just said to be for Miss Fairlie," answered the lad, holding
out the letter as he spoke.
Miss Halcombe took it from him, and looked at the address.
"A strange handwriting," she said to herself. "Who can Laura's correspondent be?
Where did you get this?" she continued, addressing the gardener.
"Well, miss," said the lad, "I just got it from a woman."
"What woman?"
"A woman well stricken in age."
"Oh, an old woman. Any one you knew?"
"I canna' tak' it on mysel' to say that she was other than a stranger to me."
"Which way did she go?"
"That gate," said the under-gardener, turning with great deliberation towards
the south, and embracing the whole of that part of England with one
comprehensive sweep of his arm.
"Curious," said Miss Halcombe; "I suppose it must be a begging-letter. There,"
she added, handing the letter back to the lad, "take it to the house, and give
it to one of the servants. And now, Mr. Hartright, if you have no objection, let
us walk this way."
She led me across the lawn, along the same path by which I had followed her on
the day after my arrival at Limmeridge. At the little summer-house in which
Laura Fairlie and I had first seen each other, she stopped, and broke the
silence which she had steadily maintained while we were walking together.
"What I have to say to you, I can say here."
With those words, she entered the summer-house, took one of the chairs at the
little round table inside, and signed to me to take the other. I had suspected
what was coming when she spoke to me in the breakfast-room; I felt certain of it
now.
"Mr. Hartright," she said, "I am going to begin by making a frank avowal to you.
I am going to say — without phrase-making, which I detest; or paying
compliments, which I heartily despise — that I have come, in the course of your
residence with us, to feel a strong friendly regard for you. I was predisposed
in your favour when you first told me of your conduct towards that unhappy woman
whom you met under such remarkable circumstances. Your management of the affair
might not have been prudent; but it showed the self-control, the delicacy, and
the compassion of a man who was naturally a gentleman. It made me expect good
things from you; and you have not disappointed my expectations."
She paused — but held up her hand at the same time, as a sign that she awaited
no answer from me before she proceeded. When I entered the summer-house, no
thought was in me of the woman in white. But, now, Miss Halcombe's own words had
put the memory of my adventure back in my mind. It remained there, throughout
the interview — remained, and not without a result.
"As your friend," she proceeded, "I am going to tell you, at once, in my own
plain, blunt, downright language, that I have discovered your secret — without
help or hint, mind, from any one else. Mr. Hartright, you have thoughtlessly
allowed yourself to form an attachment — a serious and devoted attachment, I am
afraid — to my sister, Laura. I don't put you to the pain of confessing it, in
so many words, because I see and know that you are too honest to deny it. I
don't even blame you — I pity you for opening your heart to a hopeless
affection. You have not attempted to take any underhand advantage — you have
not spoken to my sister in secret. You are guilty of weakness and want of
attention to your own best interests, but of nothing worse. If you had acted, in
any single respect, less delicately and less modestly, I should have told you to
leave the house, without an instant's notice, or an instant's consultation of
anybody. As it is, I blame the misfortune of your years and your position — I
don't blame you. Shake hands — I
have given you pain; I am going to give you more; but there is no help for it —
shake hands with your friend, Marian Halcombe, first."
The sudden kindness — the warm, high-minded, fearless sympathy which met me on
such mercifully-equal terms, which appealed with such delicate and generous
abruptness straight to my heart, my honour, and my courage, overcame me in an
instant. I tried to look at her, when she took my hand, but my eyes were dim. I
tried to thank her, but my voice failed me.
"Listen to me," she said, considerately avoiding all notice of my loss of
self-control. "Listen to me, and let us get it over at once. It is a real, true
relief to me that I am not obliged, in what I have now to say, to enter into the
question — the hard and cruel question as I think it — of social inequalities.
Circumstances which will try you to
the quick, spare me the ungracious
necessity of paining a man who has lived in friendly intimacy under the same
roof with myself by any humiliating reference to matters of rank and station.
You must leave Limmeridge House, Mr. Hartright, before more harm is done. It is
my duty to say that to you; and it would be equally my duty to say it, under
precisely the same serious necessity, if you were the representative of the
oldest and wealthiest family in England. You must leave us, not because you are
a teacher of drawing ——"
She waited a moment; turned her face full on me; and, reaching across the table,
laid her hand firmly on my arm.
"Not because you are a teacher of drawing," she repeated, "but because Laura
Fairlie is engaged to be married."
The last word went like a bullet to my heart. My arm lost all sensation of the
hand that grasped it. I never moved, and never spoke. The sharp autumn breeze
that scattered the dead leaves at our feet, came as cold to me, on a sudden, as
if my own mad hopes were dead leaves, too, whirled away by the wind like the
rest. Hopes! Betrothed, or not betrothed, she was equally far from
me. Would other men have remembered
that in my place? Not if they had loved her as I did.
The pang passed; and nothing but the dull numbing pain of it remained. I felt
Miss Halcombe's hand again, tightening its hold on my arm — I raised my head,
and looked at her. Her large black eyes were rooted on me, watching the white
change on my face, which I felt, and which she saw.
"Crush it!" she said. "Here, where you first saw her, crush it! Don't shrink
under it like a woman. Tear it out; trample it under foot like a man!"
The suppressed vehemence with which she spoke; the strength which her will —
concentrated in the look she fixed on me, and in the hold on my arm that she had
not yet relinquished — communicated to mine, steadied me. We both waited for a
minute, in silence. At the end of that time, I had justified her generous faith
in my manhood; I had, outwardly at least, recovered my self-control.
"Are you yourself again?"
"Enough myself, Miss Halcombe, to ask your pardon and hers. Enough myself, to be
guided by your advice, and to prove my gratitude in that way, if I can prove it
in no other."
"You have proved it already," she answered, "by those words. Mr. Hartright,
concealment is at an end between us. I cannot affect to hide from
you, what my sister has unconsciously
shown to me. You must leave us for
her sake, as well as for your own. Your presence here, your necessary intimacy
with us, harmless as it has been, God knows, in all other respects, has
unsteadied her and made her wretched. I, who love her better than my own life —
I who have learnt to believe in that pure, noble, innocent nature as I believe
in my religion — know but too well the secret misery of self-reproach that she
has been suffering, since the first shadow of a feeling disloyal to her marriage
engagement entered her heart in spite of her. I don't say — it would be useless
to attempt to say it, after what has happened — that her engagement has ever
had a strong hold on her affections. It is an engagement of honour, not of love
— her father sanctioned it on his death-bed, two years since — she herself
neither welcomed it, nor shrank from it — she was content to make it. Till you
came here, she was in the position of hundreds of other women, who marry men
without being greatly attracted to them or greatly repelled by them, and who
learn to love them (when they don't learn to hate!) after marriage, instead of
before. I hope more earnestly than words can say — and you should have the
self-sacrificing courage to hope too — that the new thoughts and feelings which
have disturbed the old calmness and the old content, have not taken root too
deeply to be ever removed. Your absence (if I had less belief in your honour,
and your courage, and your sense, I should not trust to them as I am trusting
now) — your absence will help my efforts; and time will help us all three. It
is something to know that my first confidence in you was not all misplaced. It
is something to know that you will not be less honest, less manly, less
considerate towards the pupil whose relation to yourself you have had the
misfortune to forget, than towards the stranger and the outcast whose appeal to
you was not made in vain."
Again the chance reference to the woman in white! Was there no possibility of
speaking of Miss Fairlie and of me without raising the memory of Anne Catherick,
and setting her between us like a fatality that it was hopeless to avoid?
"Tell me what apology I can make to Mr. Fairlie for breaking my engagement," I
said. "Tell me when to go after that apology is accepted. I promise implicit
obedience to you and to your advice."
"Time is, every way, of importance," she answered. "You heard me refer this
morning to Monday next, and to the necessity of setting the purple room in
order. The visitor whom we expect on Monday ——"
I could not wait for her to be more explicit. Knowing what I knew now, the
memory of Miss Fairlie's look and manner at the breakfast-table told me that the
expected visitor at Limmeridge House was her future husband. I tried to force it
back; but something rose within me at that moment stronger than my own will; and
I interrupted Miss Halcombe.
"Let me go to-day," I said, bitterly. "The sooner the better."
"No; not to-day," she replied. "The only reason you can assign to Mr. Fairlie
for your departure, before the end of your engagement, must be that an
unforeseen necessity compels you to ask his permission to return at once to
London. You must wait till to-morrow to tell him that, at the time when the post
comes in, because he will then understand the sudden change in your plans, by
associating it with the arrival of a letter from London. It is miserable and
sickening to descend to deceit, even of the most harmless kind — but I know Mr.
Fairlie, and if you once excite his suspicions that you are trifling with him,
he will refuse to release you. Speak to him on Friday morning; occupy yourself
afterwards (for the sake of your own interests with your employer), in leaving
your unfinished work in as little confusion as possible; and quit this place on
Saturday. It will be time enough then, Mr. Hartright, for you, and for all of
us."
Before I could assure her that she might depend on my acting in the strictest
accordance with her wishes, we were both startled by advancing footsteps in the
shrubbery. Some one was coming from the house to seek for us! I felt the blood
rush into my cheeks, and then leave them again. Could the third person who was
fast approaching us, at such a time and under such circumstances, be Miss Fairlie?
It was a relief — so sadly, so hopelessly was my position towards her changed
already — it was absolutely a relief to me, when the person who had disturbed
us appeared at the entrance of the summer-house, and proved to be only Miss
Fairlie's maid.
"Could I speak to you for a moment, miss?" said the girl, in rather a flurried,
unsettled manner.
Miss Halcombe descended the steps into the shrubbery, and walked aside a few
paces with the maid.
Left by myself, my mind reverted, with a sense of forlorn wretchedness which it
is not in any words that I can find to describe, to my approaching return to the
solitude and the despair of my lonely London home. Thoughts of my kind old
mother, and of my sister, who had rejoiced with her so innocently over my
prospects in Cumberland — thoughts whose long banishment from my heart it was
now my shame and my reproach to realise for the first time — came back to me
with the loving mournfulness of old, neglected friends. My mother and my sister,
what would they feel when I returned to them from my broken engagement, with the
confession of my miserable secret — they who had parted from me so hopefully on
that last happy night in the Hampstead cottage!
Anne Catherick again! Even the memory of the farewell evening with my mother and
my sister could not return to me now, unconnected with that other memory of the
moonlight walk back to London. What did it mean? Were that woman and I to meet
once more? It was possible, at the least. Did she know that I lived in London?
Yes; I had told her so, either before or after that strange question of hers,
when she had asked me so distrustfully if I knew many men of the rank of
Baronet. Either before or after — my mind was not calm enough, then, to
remember which.
A few minutes elapsed before Miss Halcombe dismissed the maid and came back to
me. She, too, looked flurried and unsettled, now.
"We have arranged all that is necessary, Mr. Hartright," she said. "We have
understood each other, as friends should; and we may go back at once to the
house. To tell you the truth, I am uneasy about Laura. She has sent to say she
wants to see me directly; and the maid reports that her mistress is apparently
very much agitated by a letter that she has received this morning — the same
letter, no doubt, which I sent on to the house before we came here."
We retraced our steps together hastily along the shrubbery path. Although Miss
Halcombe had ended all that she thought it necessary to say, on her side, I had
not ended all that I wanted to say on mine. From the moment when I had
discovered that the expected visitor at Limmeridge was Miss Fairlie's future
husband, I had felt a bitter curiosity, a burning envious eagerness, to know who
he was. It was possible that a future opportunity of putting the question might
not easily offer; so I risked asking it on our way back to the house.
"Now that you are kind enough to tell me we have understood each other, Miss
Halcombe," I said; "now that you are sure of my gratitude for your forbearance
and my obedience to your wishes, may I venture to ask who" — (I hesitated; I
had forced myself to think of him, but it was harder still to speak of him, as
her promised husband) — "who the gentleman engaged to Miss Fairlie, is?"
Her mind was evidently occupied with the message she had received from her
sister. She answered, in a hasty, absent way:
"A gentleman of large property, in Hampshire."
Hampshire! Anne Catherick's native place. Again, and yet again, the woman in
white. There was a fatality in it.
"And his name?" I said, as quietly and indifferently as I could.
"Sir Percival Glyde."
Sir
— Sir Percival! Anne Catherick's question — that suspicious question about the
men of the rank of Baronet whom I might happen to know — had hardly been
dismissed from my mind by Miss Halcombe's return to me in the summer-house,
before it was recalled again by her own answer. I stopped suddenly, and looked
at her.
"Sir Percival Glyde," she repeated, imagining that I had not heard her former
reply.
"Knight, or Baronet?" I asked, with an agitation that I could hide no longer.
She paused for a moment, and then answered, rather coldly:
"Baronet, of course."
All The Year Round, 17 December 1859, Vol.II, No.34, pp.165-171.
Weekly Part 4.
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