the change meant more than this. There was
a coldness in her hand, there was an unnatural immobility in her face,
there was in all her movements the mute expression of constant fear and
clinging self-reproach. The sensations that I could trace to herself
and to me, the unacknowledged sensations that we were feeling in
common, were not these. There were certain elements of the change in
her that were still secretly drawing us together, and others that were,
as secretly, beginning to drive us apart.

In my doubt and perplexity, in my vague suspicion of something hidden
which I was left to find by my own unaided efforts, I examined Miss
Halcombe's looks and manner for enlightenment. Living in such intimacy
as ours, no serious alteration could take place in any one of us which
did not sympathetically affect the others. The change in Miss Fairlie
was reflected in her half-sister. Although not a word escaped Miss
Halcombe which hinted at an altered state of feeling towards myself,
her penetrating eyes had contracted a new habit of always watching me.
Sometimes the look was like suppressed anger, sometimes like suppressed
dread, sometimes like neither--like nothing, in short, which I could
understand. A week elapsed, leaving us all three still in this
position of secret constraint towards one another. My situation,
aggravated by the sense of my own miserable weakness and forgetfulness
of myself, now too late awakened in me, was becoming intolerable. I
felt that I must cast off the oppression under which I was living, at
once and for ever--yet how to act for the best, or what to say first,
was more than I could tell.

From this position of helplessness and humiliation I was rescued by
Miss Halcombe. Her lips told me the bitter, the necessary, the
unexpected truth; her hearty kindness sustained me under the shock of
hearing it; her sense and courage turned to its right use an event
which threatened the worst that could happen, to me and to others, in
Limmeridge House.

X

It was on a Thursday in the week, and nearly at the end of the third
month of my sojourn in Cumberland.

In the morning, when I went down into the breakfast-room at the usual
hour, Miss Halcombe, for the first time since I had known her, was
absent from her customary place at the table.

Miss Fairlie was out on the lawn. She bowed to me, but did not come
in. Not a word had dropped from my lips, or from hers, that could
unsettle either of