"Gone again!" exclaimed Blanche, looking uneasily round the empty room. "Anne! there's something so strange in all this, that I neither can, nor will, put up with your silence any longer. It's not just, it's not kind, to shut me out of your confidence, after we have lived together like sisters all our lives!"
Anne sighed bitterly, and kissed her on the forehead. "You shall know all I can tell you--all I _dare_ tell you," she said, gently. "Don't reproach me. It hurts me more than you think."
She turned away to the side table, and came back with a letter in her hand. "Read that," she said, and handed it to Blanche.
Blanche saw her own name, on the address, in the handwriting of Anne.
"What does this mean?" she asked.
"I wrote to you, after Sir Patrick had left me," Anne replied. "I meant you to have received my letter to-morrow, in time to prevent any little imprudence into which your anxiety might hurry you. All that I _can_ say to you is said there. Spare me the distress of speaking. Read it, Blanche."
Blanche still held the letter, unopened.
"A letter from you to me! when we are both together, and both alone in the same room! It's worse than formal, Anne! It's as if there was a quarrel between us. Why should it distress you to speak to me?"
Anne's eyes dropped to the ground. She pointed to the letter for the second time.
Blanche broke the seal.
She passed rapidly over the opening sentences, and devoted all her attention to the second paragraph.
"And now, my love, you will expect me to atone for the surprise and distress that I have caused you, by explaining what my situation really is, and by telling you all my plans for the future. Dearest Blanche! don't think me untrue to the affection we bear toward each other--don't think there is any change in my heart toward you--believe only that I am a very unhappy woman, and that I am in a position which forces me, against my own will, to be silent about myself. Silent even to you, the sister of my love--the one person in the world who is dearest to me! A time may come when I shall be able to open my heart to you. Oh, what good it will do me! what a relief it will be! For the present, I must be silent. For the present, we must be parted. God knows what it costs me to write this. I think of the dear old days that are gone; I remember how I promised your mother to be a sister to you, when her kind eyes looked at me, for the last time--_your_ mother, who was an angel from heaven to _ mine!_ All this comes back on me now, and breaks my heart. But it must be! my own Blanche, for the present. it must be! I will write often--I will think of you, my darling, night and day, till a happier future unites us again. God bless _you,_ my dear one! And God help _ me!"_ Blanche silently crossed the room to the sofa on which Anne was sitting, and stood there for a moment, looking at her. She sat down, and laid her head on Anne's shoulder. Sorrowfully and quietly, she put the letter into her bosom--and took Anne's hand, and kissed it.
"All my questions are answered, dear. I will wait your time."
It was simply, sweetly, generously said.
Anne burst into tears.
* * * * * *
The rain still fell, but the storm was dying away.
Blanche left the sofa, and, going to the window, opened the shutters to look out at the night. She suddenly came back to Anne.
"I see lights," she said--"the lights of a carriage coming up out of the darkness of the moor. They are sending after me, from Windygates. Go into t he bedroom. It's just possible Lady Lundie may have come for me herself."
The ordinary relations of the two toward each other were completely reversed. Anne was like a child in Blanche's hands.
She rose, and withdrew.
Left alone, Blanche took the letter out of her bosom, and read it again, in the interval of waiting for the carriage.
The second reading confirmed her in a resolution which she had privately taken, while she had been sitting by Anne on the sofa--a resolution destined to lead to far more serious results in the future than any previsions of hers could anticipate. Sir Patrick was the one person she knew on whose discretion and experience she could implicitly rely. She determined, in Anne's own interests, to take her uncle into her confidence, and to tell him all that had happened at the inn "I'll first make him forgive me," thought Blanche. "And then I'll see if he thinks as I do, when I tell him about Anne."
The carriage drew up at the door; and Mrs. Inchbare showed in--not Lady Lundie, but Lady Lundie's maid.
The woman's account of what had happened at Windygates was simple enough. Lady Lundie had, as a matter of course, placed the right interpretation on Blanche's abrupt departure in the pony-chaise, and had ordered the carriage, with the firm determination of following her step-daughter herself. But the agitations and anxieties of the day had proved too much for her. She had been seized by one of the attacks of giddiness to which she was always subject after excessive mental irritation; and, eager as she was (on more accounts than one) to go to the inn herself, she had been compelled, in Sir Patrick's absence, to commit the pursuit of Blanche to her own maid, in whose age and good sense she could place every confidence. The woman seeing the state of the weather--had thoughtfully brought a box with her, containing a change of wearing apparel. In offering it to Blanche, she added, with all due respect, that she had full powers from her mistress to go on, if necessary, to the shooting-cottage, and to place the matter in Sir Patrick's hands. This said, she left it to her young lady to decide for herself, whether she would return to Windygates, under present circumstances, or not.
Blanche took the box from the woman's hands, and joined Anne in the bedroom, to dress herself for the drive home.
"I am going back to a good scolding," she said. "But a scolding is no novelty in my experience of Lady Lundie. I'm not uneasy about that, Anne--I'm uneasy about you. Can I be sure of one thing--do you stay here for the present?"
