mber in her mind, and he knew not yet what
other secrets might inhabit it.

The shock of finding her gone when he reached home gave a new turn to
his feelings. She had made no mystery of her destination, leaving word
with the servants that she had gone to town to see Mr. Langhope; and
Amherst found a note from her on his study table.

"I feel," she wrote, "that I ought to see Mr. Langhope myself, and be
the first to tell him what must be told. It was like you, dearest, to
wish to spare me this, but it would have made me more unhappy; and Mr.
Langhope might wish to hear the facts in my own words. I shall come back
tomorrow, and after that it will be for you to decide what must be
done."

The brevity and simplicity of the note were characteristic; in moments
of high tension Justine was always calm and direct. And it was like her,
too, not to make any covert appeal to his sympathy, not to seek to
entrap his judgment by caressing words and plaintive allusions. The
quiet tone in which she stated her purpose matched the firmness and
courage of the act, and for a moment Amherst was shaken by a revulsion
of feeling. Her heart was level with his, after all--if she had done
wrong she would bear the brunt of it alone. It was so exactly what he
himself would have felt and done in such a situation that faith in her
flowed back through all the dried channels of his heart. But an instant
later the current set the other way. The wretched years of his first
marriage had left in him a residue of distrust, a tendency to dissociate
every act from its ostensible motive. He had been too profoundly the
dupe of his own enthusiasm not to retain this streak of scepticism, and
it now moved him to ask if Justine's sudden departure had not been
prompted by some other cause than the one she avowed. Had that alone
actuated her, why not have told it to him, and asked his consent to her
plan? Why let him leave the house without a hint of her purpose, and
slip off by the first train as soon as he was safe at Westmore? Might it
not be that she had special reasons for wishing Mr. Langhope to _hear
her own version first_--that there were questions she wished to parry
herself, explanations she could trust no one to make for her? The
thought plunged Amherst into deeper misery. He knew not how to defend
himself against these disintegrating suspicions--he felt only that, once
the accord between two minds is broken, it is less easy to restore than
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