"I have an appointment with Miss Garth. Is she ready to see me?"

"Quite ready, sir."

"Is she alone?"

"Yes, sir."

"In the room which was Mr. Vanstone's study?"

"In that room, sir."

The servant opened the door and Mr. Pendril went in.

The governess stood alone at the study window. The morning was
oppressively hot, and she threw up the lower sash to admit more air into
the room, as Mr. Pendril entered it.

They bowed to each other with a formal politeness, which betrayed on
either side an uneasy sense of restraint. Mr. Pendril was one of the
many men who appear superficially to the worst advantage, under the
influence of strong mental agitation which it is necessary for them to
control. Miss Garth, on her side, had not forgotten the ungraciously
guarded terms in which the lawyer had replied to her letter; and the
natural anxiety which she had felt on the subject of the interview was
not relieved by any favorable opinion of the man who sought it. As
they confronted each other in the silence of the summer's morning--both
dressed in black; Miss Garth's hard features, gaunt and haggard with
grief; the lawyer's cold, colorless face, void of all marked expression,
suggestive of a business embarrassment and of nothing more--it would
have been hard to find two persons less attractive externally to any
ordinary sympathies than the two who had now met together, the one to
tell, the other to hear, the secrets of the dead.

"I am sincerely sorry, Miss Garth, to intrude on you at such a time as
this. But circumstances, as I have already explained, leave me no other
choice."

"Will you take a seat, Mr. Pendril? You wished to see me in this room, I
believe?"

"Only in this room, because Mr. Vanstone's papers are kept here, and I
may find it necessary to refer to some of them."

After that formal interchange of question and answer, they sat down
on either side of a table placed close under the window. One waited
to speak, the other waited to bear. There was a momentary silence. Mr.
Pendril broke it by referring to the young ladies, with the customary
expressions of sympathy. Miss Garth answered him with the same ceremony,
in the same conventional tone. There was a second pause of silence. The
humming of flies among the evergreen shrubs under the window penetrated
drowsily into the room; and the tramp of a heavy-footed cart-horse,
plodding along the high-road beyond the garden, was as plainly audible
in the stilln