you be good enough to say that I understand the letter, and that
I am very much obliged?" I said. "There is no other reply necessary at
present."

Exactly at the moment when I was speaking those words, holding the
letter open in my hand, Count Fosco turned the corner of the lane from
the high-road, and stood before me as if he had sprung up out of the
earth.

The suddenness of his appearance, in the very last place under heaven
in which I should have expected to see him, took me completely by
surprise. The messenger wished me good-morning, and got into the fly
again. I could not say a word to him--I was not even able to return
his bow. The conviction that I was discovered--and by that man, of all
others--absolutely petrified me.

"Are you going back to the house, Miss Halcombe?" he inquired, without
showing the least surprise on his side, and without even looking after
the fly, which drove off while he was speaking to me.

I collected myself sufficiently to make a sign in the affirmative.

"I am going back too," he said. "Pray allow me the pleasure of
accompanying you. Will you take my arm? You look surprised at seeing
me!"

I took his arm. The first of my scattered senses that came back was
the sense that warned me to sacrifice anything rather than make an
enemy of him.

"You look surprised at seeing me!" he repeated in his quietly
pertinacious way.

"I thought, Count, I heard you with your birds in the breakfast-room,"
I answered, as quietly and firmly as I could.

"Surely. But my little feathered children, dear lady, are only too
like other children. They have their days of perversity, and this
morning was one of them. My wife came in as I was putting them back in
their cage, and said she had left you going out alone for a walk. You
told her so, did you not?"

"Certainly."

"Well, Miss Halcombe, the pleasure of accompanying you was too great a
temptation for me to resist. At my age there is no harm in confessing
so much as that, is there? I seized my hat, and set off to offer myself
as your escort. Even so fat an old man as Fosco is surely better than
no escort at all? I took the wrong path--I came back in despair, and
here I am, arrived (may I say it?) at the height of my wishes."

He talked on in this complimentary strain with a fluency which left me
no exertion to make beyond the effort of maintaining my composure. He
never referred in the most distant manner to what he had seen in t