d, she would certainly
have remembered it. Miss Bygrave was unquestionably a stranger; and
yet--

She had got no further than this during the day; she could get no
further now: the chain of thought broke. Her mind took up the fragments,
and formed another chain which attached itself to the lady who was kept
in seclusion--to the aunt, who looked well, and yet was nervous; who was
nervous, and yet able to ply her needle and thread. An incomprehensible
resemblance to some unremembered voice in the niece; an unintelligible
malady which kept the aunt secluded from public view; an extraordinary
range of scientific cultivation in the uncle, associated with a
coarseness and audacity of manner which by no means suggested the idea
of a man engaged in studious pursuits--were the members of this small
family of three what they seemed on the surface of them?

With that question on her mind, she went to bed.

As soon as the candle was out, the darkness seemed to communicate some
inexplicable perversity to her thoughts. They wandered back from present
things to past, in spite of her. They brought her old master back to
life again; they revived forgotten sayings and doings in the English
circle at Zurich; they veered away to the old man's death-bed at
Brighton; they moved from Brighton to London; they entered the bare,
comfortless room at Vauxhall Walk; they set the Aquarium back in its
place on the kitchen table, and put the false Miss Garth in the chair
by the side of it, shading her inflamed eyes from the light; they placed
the anonymous letter, the letter which glanced darkly at a conspiracy,
in her hand again, and brought her with it into her master's presence;
they recalled the discussion about filling in the blank space in the
advertisement, and the quarrel that followed when she told Noel Vanstone
that the sum he had offered was preposterously small; they revived an
old doubt which had not troubled her for weeks past--a doubt whether the
threatened conspiracy had evaporated in mere words, or whether she and
her master were likely to hear of it again. At this point her thoughts
broke off once more, and there was a momentary blank. The next instant
she started up in bed; her heart beating violently, her head whirling
as if she had lost her senses. With electric suddenness her mind pieced
together its scattered multitude of thoughts, and put them before her
plainly under one intelligible form. In the all-mastering agitation of