to
lie down a great deal," etc.; but she assented to Mrs. Markham's proposal
with the same indifference with which she had listened to Esculapius.

They drove on for some distance through a straggling village, with its
ivied church guarded by sentinel cypresses, children were playing about
with hands full of cowslips, and lilac bushes blossomed within cottage
palings. A little beyond they turned into Sir Thomas Farquhar's park,
where young rooks were cawing, unwitting of their predestined pastried
tomb. On entering a long, shady avenue, Mrs. Markham pulled the horse up
to a walk, and said quietly,--"When were you married, Miss Leigh?"

Perhaps this question had not been unexpected since the little episode of
the ring, for, with equal calmness, Bluebell replied,--"The last week in
November, at Liverpool."

Mrs. Markham felt a triumphant thrill. She would now hear the solution
of the mystery that had been exercising her imaginative powers for some
weeks. She poured forth question after question. Yet, at the end of
half-an-hour, not only had she failed to extort Dutton's name, but had
even entangled herself in a promise of inviolable silence as to the only
admitted fact.

She had insisted, threatened, got angry; Bluebell sorrowfully offered to
go, but remained firm.

"Well, keep your secret, then," cried Mrs. Markham, at last, abandoning
the contest; "but I shall find it out if I can. And I must take care that
Walter doesn't," thought she, with a mischievous chuckle, for that
gentleman, many years older than his wife, was a servile worshipper of
Mrs. Grundy, and his hair would have stood on end had he known that he
was harbouring a young lady with such suspicious antecedents. Besides her
personal liking for Bluebell, Mrs. Markham recollected that if dismissed
at this juncture she could scarcely recommend her to any other situation,
and then what would become of the poor thing? But what puzzled her most
was the total disappearance of the husband to whom she had been so very
lately married.

A clue to this, however, she believed herself to have obtained on
observing that Bluebell never failed to study the daily papers with
an avidity unusual at her age.

"He must be in the army and gone to the Crimea," thought she. "Poor
thing! how dreadful! Some day she will see him in the list of killed and
wounded."

Some little time after, Bluebell, who had in a great measure recovered
her strength, came to her room, and said,