He saw how his parting kindness touched her and thoughtfully hastened the farewell.  She took his hand in both her own and murmured a few broken words of gratitude.  “Trust me to do my best,” he said—­and, turning away with a merciful abruptness, left her.  In the broad, cheerful sunshine he had come in to reveal the fatal truth.  In the broad, cheerful sunshine—­that truth disclosed—­he went out.

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.  That summons, again, had produced the inevitable acceleration of the Saturday’s journey to Friday; the Friday of the fatal accident, the Friday when he went to his death.  From his death followed the second bereavement which had made the house desolate; the helpless position of the daughters whose prosperous future had been his dearest care; the revelation of the secret which had overwhelmed her that morning; the disclosure, more terrible still, which she now stood committed to make to the orphan sisters.  For the first time she saw the whole sequence of events—­saw it as plainly as the cloudless blue of the sky and the green glow of the trees in the sunlight outside.

How—­when could she tell them?  Who could approach them with the disclosure of their own illegitimacy before their father and mother had been dead a week?  Who could speak the dreadful words, while the first tears were wet on their cheeks, while the first pang of separation was at its keenest in their hearts, while the memory of the funeral was not a day old yet?  Not their last friend left; not the faithful woman whose heart bled for them.  No! silence for the present time, at all risks—­merciful silence, for many days to come!