the moment, she clapped her hands together, and cried out suddenly in
the darkness:

"Miss Vanstone again!!!"

She got out of bed and kindled the light once more. Steady as her nerves
were, the shock of her own suspicion had shaken them. Her firm hand
trembled as she opened her dressing-case and took from it a little
bottle of sal-volatile. In spite of her smooth cheeks and her
well-preserved hair, she looked every year of her age as she mixed the
spirit with water, greedily drank it, and, wrapping her dressing-gown
round her, sat down on the bedside to get possession again of her calmer
self.

She was quite incapable of tracing the mental process which had led her
to discovery. She could not get sufficiently far from herself to see
that her half-formed conclusions on the subject of the Bygraves had
ended in making that family objects of suspicion to her; that the
association of ideas had thereupon carried her mind back to that other
object of suspicion which was represented by the conspiracy against
her master; and that the two ideas of those two separate subjects of
distrust, coming suddenly in contact, had struck the light. She was not
able to reason back in this way from the effect to the cause. She could
only feel that the suspicion had become more than a suspicion already:
conviction itself could not have been more firmly rooted in her mind.

Looking back at Magdalen by the new light now thrown on her, Mrs.
Lecount would fain have persuaded herself that she recognized some
traces left of the false Miss Garth's face and figure in the graceful
and beautiful girl who had sat at her master's table hardly an hour
since--that she found resemblances now, which she had never thought of
before, between the angry voice she had heard in Vauxhall Walk and the
smooth, well-bred tones which still hung on her ears after the evening's
experience downstairs. She would fain have persuaded herself that she
had reached these results with no undue straining of the truth as she
really knew it, but the effort was in vain.

Mrs. Lecount was not a woman to waste time and thought in trying to
impose on herself. She accepted the inevitable conclusion that the
guesswork of a moment had led her to discovery. And, more than that, she
recognized the plain truth--unwelcome as it was--that the conviction now
fixed in her own mind was thus far unsupported by a single fragment of
producible evidence to justify it to the minds of others.

Und