you! Come away--we may be
interrupted here--come at once into my room."

With those eager words she caught me by the hand, and led me through
the library, to the end room on the ground floor, which had been fitted
up for her own especial use. No third person, except her maid, could
have any excuse for surprising us here. She pushed me in before her,
locked the door, and drew the chintz curtains that hung over the inside.

The strange, stunned feeling which had taken possession of me still
remained. But a growing conviction that the complications which had
long threatened to gather about her, and to gather about me, had
suddenly closed fast round us both, was now beginning to penetrate my
mind. I could not express it in words--I could hardly even realise it
dimly in my own thoughts. "Anne Catherick!" I whispered to myself,
with useless, helpless reiteration--"Anne Catherick!"

Laura drew me to the nearest seat, an ottoman in the middle of the
room. "Look!" she said, "look here!"--and pointed to the bosom of her
dress.

I saw, for the first time, that the lost brooch was pinned in its place
again. There was something real in the sight of it, something real in
the touching of it afterwards, which seemed to steady the whirl and
confusion in my thoughts, and to help me to compose myself.

"Where did you find your brooch?" The first words I could say to her
were the words which put that trivial question at that important moment.

"SHE found it, Marian."

"Where?"

"On the floor of the boat-house. Oh, how shall I begin--how shall I
tell you about it! She talked to me so strangely--she looked so
fearfully ill--she left me so suddenly!"

Her voice rose as the tumult of her recollections pressed upon her
mind. The inveterate distrust which weighs, night and day, on my
spirits in this house, instantly roused me to warn her--just as the
sight of the brooch had roused me to question her, the moment before.

"Speak low," I said. "The window is open, and the garden path runs
beneath it. Begin at the beginning, Laura. Tell me, word for word,
what passed between that woman and you."

"Shall I close the window?"

"No, only speak low--only remember that Anne Catherick is a dangerous
subject under your husband's roof. Where did you first see her?"

"At the boat-house, Marian. I went out, as you know, to find my
brooch, and I walked along the path through the plantation, looking
down on the ground carefully at e