CHAPTER XIV.
IT was nearly an hour past noon when Mr.Pendril left the house.

Miss Garth sat down again at the table alone, and tried to face the necessity which the event of the morning now forced on her.
Her mind was not equal to the effort.

She tried to lessen the strain on it--to lose the sense of her own position--to escape from her thoughts for a few minutes only.

After a little, she opened Mr.Vanstone's letter, and mechanically set herself to read it through once more.
One by one, the last words of the dead man fastened themselves more and more firmly on her attention.

The unrelieved solitude, the unbroken silence, helped their influence on her mind and opened it to those very impressions of past and present which she was most anxious to shun.
As she reached the melancholy lines which closed the letter, she found herself--insensibly, almost unconsciously, at first--tracing the fatal chain of events, link by link backward, until she reached its beginning in the contemplated marriage between Magdalen and Francis Clare.
That marriage had taken Mr.Vanstone to his old friend, with the confession on his lips which would otherwise never have escaped them.
Thence came the discovery which had sent him home to summon the lawyer to the house.