Her doubt was confirmed as a certainty; and the result, which might be expected to take place toward the end of the summer, was, at her age and with her constitutional peculiarities, a subject for serious future anxiety, to say the least of it.

The physician had done his best to encourage her; but she had understood the drift of his questions more clearly than he supposed, and she knew that he looked to the future with more than ordinary doubt.
Having disclosed these particulars, Mrs.Vanstone requested that they might be kept a secret between her correspondent and herself.

She had felt unwilling to mention her suspicions to Miss Garth, until those suspicions had been confirmed--and she now recoiled, with even greater reluctance, from allowing her daughters to be in any way alarmed about her.

It would be best to dismiss the subject for the present, and to wait hopefully till the summer came.

In the meantime they would all, she trusted, be happily reunited on the twenty-third of the month, which Mr.
Vanstone had fixed on as the day for their return.