She locked her door, threw herself in a chair; almost gasping for breath, she covered her face with her hands.  It was some minutes before she recovered comparative composure; she rose and looked in the mirror; her face was quite white, but her eyes glittering with excitement.  She walked up and down her room with a troubled step, and a scarlet flush alternately returned to and retired from her changing cheek.  Then she leaned against a cabinet in thought.  She was disturbed from her musings by the sound of Pauncefort’s step along the vestibule, as she quitted her mother’s chamber.  In a few minutes Venetia herself stepped forth into the vestibule and listened.  All was silent.  The golden morning had summoned the whole household to its enjoyment.  Not a voice, not a domestic sound, broke the complete stillness.  Venetia again repaired to the apartment of Lady Annabel.  Her step was light, but agitated; it seemed that she scarcely dared to breathe.  She opened the door, rushed to the cabinet, pressed the spring lock, caught at something that it contained, and hurried again to her own chamber.

And what is this prize that the trembling Venetia holds almost convulsively in her grasp, apparently without daring even to examine it?  Is this the serene and light-hearted girl, whose face was like the cloudless splendour of a sunny day?  Why is she so pallid and perturbed?  What strong impulse fills her frame?  She clutches in her hand a key!

On that tempestuous night of passionate sorrow which succeeded the first misunderstanding between Venetia and her mother, when the voice of Lady Annabel had suddenly blended with that of her kneeling child, and had ratified with her devotional concurrence her wailing supplications; even at the moment when Venetia, in a rapture of love and duty, felt herself pressed to her mother’s reconciled heart, it had not escaped her that Lady Annabel held in her hand a key; and though the feelings which that night had so forcibly developed, and which the subsequent conduct of Lady Annabel had so carefully and skilfully cherished, had impelled Venetia to banish and erase from her thought and memory all the associations which that spectacle, however slight, was calculated to awaken, still, in her present mood, the unexpected vision of the same instrument, identical she could not doubt, had triumphed in an instant over all the long discipline of her mind and conduct, in an instant had baffled and dispersed her self-control, and been hailed as the providential means by which she might at length penetrate that mystery which she now felt no longer supportable.