CHAPTER XXXIX.

WINDY BROW.

While North Aston was employing its time in wondering, and Alick Corfield was breaking his heart in sorrowing, Leam was doing battle with her despair and distress at Windy Brow—­doing the best she could to keep her senses clear and to live through the penance which she had inflicted on herself.

So far, Mrs. Pepper’s conclusions, based on a badly-gummed envelope, were right:  Miss Gryce of Windy Brow was the sister of Mr. Gryce of Lionnet, though even Mrs. Pepper did not know that Leam Dundas, under the name of Leonora Darley, was living with her.

It is not the most obvious agents that are the most influential.  The greatest things in Nature are the work of the smallest creatures, and our lives are manipulated far more by unseen influences, known only to ourselves, than by those patent to the world.  In all North Aston, Mr. Gryce was the man who had apparently the least hold on the place and the slightest connection with the people.  He had come there by accident and by choice lived in retirement, though also by choice he had not been there a month before he knew all there was to be known of every individual for miles round.  The merest chances had made him personally acquainted with Sebastian Dundas—­those chances his tenancy of Lionnet and the slight attack of fever which called forth his landlord’s sentiment and pity.  Through the father he came to know the daughter, when the prying curiosity of his nature, his liking for secret influence and concealed action, together with the kind heart at bottom, and his real affection for the girl whose confidence he had partly forced and partly won, threw the whole secret into his hands and made him master of the situation—­the keeper of the seal set against the writings whom no one suspected of complicity.  This was exactly the kind of thing he liked, and the kind of thing that suited him, human mole, born detective and conspirator as he was.

When Leam met him in the wood on the evening of her confession to Edgar, she met him with the deliberate intention of confessing her fearful secret to him too, and of asking him to help her to escape, like the friend which he had promised he would be.  She knew that it was impossible for her now to live at North Aston, and the sole desire she had was to be blotted out, as she had been.

There was no excitement about her, no feverish exaltation that would burn itself cold before twenty-four hours were over—­only the dead dreariness of heartbreak, the tenacious resolution of despair.  She neither wept nor wrung her hands, but quiet, pale, rigid, she told her terrible story in the low and level tones in which a Greek Fate might have spoken, as sad and as immutable.  She had sinned, and now had made such atonement as she could by confession—­to her lover to save him from pollution, to her father to cancel his obligations to her, to her friend to