She had got no further than this during the day; she could get no further now:  the chain of thought broke.  Her mind took up the fragments, and formed another chain which attached itself to the lady who was kept in seclusion—­to the aunt, who looked well, and yet was nervous; who was nervous, and yet able to ply her needle and thread.  An incomprehensible resemblance to some unremembered voice in the niece; an unintelligible malady which kept the aunt secluded from public view; an extraordinary range of scientific cultivation in the uncle, associated with a coarseness and audacity of manner which by no means suggested the idea of a man engaged in studious pursuits—­were the members of this small family of three what they seemed on the surface of them?

With that question on her mind, she went to bed.

As soon as the candle was out, the darkness seemed to communicate some inexplicable perversity to her thoughts.  They wandered back from present things to past, in spite of her.  They brought her old master back to life again; they revived forgotten sayings and doings in the English circle at Zurich; they veered away to the old man’s death-bed at Brighton; they moved from Brighton to London; they entered the bare, comfortless room at Vauxhall Walk; they set the Aquarium back in its place on the kitchen table, and put the false Miss Garth in the chair by the side of it, shading her inflamed eyes from the light; they placed the anonymous letter, the letter which glanced darkly at a conspiracy, in her hand again, and brought her with it into her master’s presence; they recalled the discussion about filling in the blank space in the advertisement, and the quarrel that followed when she told Noel Vanstone that the sum he had offered was preposterously small; they revived an old doubt which had not troubled her for weeks past—­a doubt whether the threatened conspiracy had evaporated in mere words, or whether she and her master were likely to hear of it again.  At this point her thoughts broke off once more, and there was a momentary blank.  The next instant she started up in bed; her heart beating violently, her head whirling as if she had lost her senses.  With electric suddenness her mind pieced together its scattered multitude of thoughts, and put them before her plainly under one intelligible form.  In the all-mastering agitation of the moment, she clapped her hands together, and cried out suddenly in the darkness: 

“Miss Vanstone again!!!”

She got out of bed and kindled the light once more.  Steady as her nerves were, the shock of her own suspicion had shaken them.  Her firm hand trembled as she opened her dressing-case and took from it a little bottle of sal-volatile.  In spite of her smooth cheeks and her well-preserved hair, she looked every year of her age as she mixed the spirit with water, greedily drank it, and, wrapping her dressing-gown round her, sat down on the bedside to get possession again of her calmer self.