room when she entered it; and
quite sure that she felt no draught of wind in any direction--in short,
she knew nothing of her own experience, but that her candle suddenly
went out; that she remained for a little time, half dead with fright,
in the darkness; and that she then managed to grope her way back to her
bedroom, in which a night-light was always burning.

Mrs. Blyth followed the progress of this strange story on Madonna's
fingers with great interest to the end; and then--after suggesting that
the candle might have gone out through some defect in the make of it, or
might really have been extinguished by a puff of air which the girl was
too much occupied in looking for her bodkin-case to attend to--earnestly
charged her not to say a word on the subject of her adventure to
Valentine, when she went to help him in packing up his painting
materials. "He is nervous and uncomfortable enough already, poor fellow,
at the idea of leaving home," thought Mrs. Blyth; "and if he heard the
story about the candle going out, it would only make him more uneasy
still." To explain this consideration to Madonna was to ensure her
discretion. She accordingly kept her adventure in the studio so profound
a secret from Mr. Blyth, that he no more suspected what had happened to
her, than he suspected what had happened to the Hair Bracelet, when he
hastily assured himself that he was leaving his bureau properly locked,
by trying the lid of it the last thing before going away.

Such were the circumstances under which Valentine left home. He was not,
however, the only traveler of the reader's acquaintance, whose departure
from London took place on the morning after the mysterious extinguishing
of Madonna's light in the painting-room. By a whimsical coincidence, it
so happened that, at the very same hour when Mr. Blyth was journeying in
one direction, to paint portraits, Mr. Matthew Marksman (now, perhaps,
also recognizable as Mr. Matthew Grice) was journeying in another, to
pay a second visit to Dibbledean.

Not a visit of pleasure by any means, but a visit of business--business,
which, in every particular, Mat had especially intended to keep secret
from Zack; but some inkling of which he had nevertheless allowed to
escape him, during his past night's conversation with the lad in Kirk
Street.

When young Thorpe and he met on the morning after that conversation, he
was sufficiently aware of the fact that his overdose of brandy had set
him