eye had been
caught by the pile of sandwiches which the kind woman, pitying his tired
looks, had brought up with the tea. He was ashamed of himself for being
hungry in such a dreadful emergency as this, but he was so, and could
not help it, though nothing would have made him confess so much, or even
touch the sandwiches till she had gone away. He pretended to ignore them
till the door was shut after her, but could not help vividly remembering
that he had eaten nothing since the morning. The sandwiches did him a
little good in his mind as well as in his body. He got rid of the vision
of the faces and of the red figure on the bench. He began to believe
that when he saw her she would tell him. Had she not said so? That after
awhile he should hear everything, and that all should be as it was
before? All as it was before--in the time when she told him everything,
even things that Granny did not know. But she had never told him this,
and the other day she had told him that it was other people's secrets,
not her own, that she was keeping from him. "Other people's secrets"--the
secrets of the man who was Philip Compton, who went to Windyhill on the
6th of September, ten days before Elinor Dennistoun's marriage day.
"What Philip Compton? Who was he? What had he to do with her? What, oh,
what," Pippo said to himself, "has he to do with me?" After all, that
was the most tremendous question. The others, or anything that had
happened twenty years ago, were nothing to that.

Meanwhile Elinor, of all places in the world, was in John Tatham's
chambers, to which he had taken her to rest. I cannot tell how Mr.
Tatham, a man so much occupied, managed to subtract from all he had to
do almost a whole day to see his cousin through the trial, and stand by
her, sparing her all the lesser annoyances which surround and exaggerate
such a great fact. He had brought her out into the fresh air, feeling
that movement was the best thing for her, and instead of taking her home
in the carriage which was waiting, had made her walk with him, supported
on his arm, on which she hung in a sort of suspended life, across the
street to the Temple, hoping thus to bring her back, by the necessity of
exertion, to herself. And indeed she was almost more restored to herself
by this remedy than John Tatham had expected or hoped. For though he
placed her in the great easy-chair, in which her slender person was
engulfed and supported, expecting her to rest there and li