Aunt Henrietta had spent the whole night, except a brief space for sleeping, in thinking over and talking over her duties and her wrongs, the two being mixed up together in inextinguishable confusion.  Almost any subject, after being churned up in such a nature as hers for twelve mortal hours, would at the end look quite different from what it did at first, or what it really was.  And so, with all honesty of purpose, and with the firmest conviction that it was the only means of saving her brother-in-law and his family from irretrievable misery and disgrace, poor Miss Gascoigne had broken through all her habits, risen, dressed, and breakfasted at an unearthly hour, and there she stood at the Lodge door at nine in the morning, determined to “do her duty,” as she expressed it, but looking miserably pale, and vainly restraining her agitation so as to keep up a good appearance “before the servants.”

“That will do, Barker.  You need not disturb the master; I came at this early hour just for a little chat with your mistress and the children.”

And then entering the parlor, she sat down opposite to Christian to take breath.

Miss Gascoigne was really to be pitied.  Mere gossip she enjoyed; it was her native element, and she had plunged into this matter of Sir Edwin Uniacke with undeniable eagerness.  But now, when it might be not gossip, but disgrace, her terror overpowered her.  For disgrace, discredit in the world’s eye, was the only form the matter took to this worldly woman, who rarely looked on things except on the outside.  Guilt, misery, and their opposites, which alone give strength to battle with them, were things too deep to be fathomed in the slightest degree by Miss Gascoigne.

Therefore, as her looks showed, she was not so much shocked as simply frightened, and had come to the Lodge with a frantic notion of hushing up the matter somehow, whatever it was.  Her principal terror was, not so much the sin itself, but that the world might hear of it.

“You see, Mrs. Grey, I am come again,” said she, very earnestly.  “In spite of every thing, I have come back to advise with you.  I am ready to overlook everything, to try and conceal everything.  Maria and I have been turning over in our minds all sorts of plans to get you away till this has blown over—­call it going to the seaside, to the country with Arthur—­any thing, in short, just that you may leave Avonsbridge.”

“I leave Avonsbridge?  Why?”

“Yon know why.  When you had a lover before your marriage, of whom you did not tell your husband or his friends—­when this gentleman afterward meets you, writes to you—­I saw the letter—­”

“You saw the letter!”

There was no hope.  She was hunted down, as many an innocent person has been before now, by a combination of evidence, half truths, half lies, or truths so twisted that they assume the aspect of lies, and lies so exceedingly probable that they are by even keen observers mistaken for truth.  Passive and powerless Christian sat.  Miss Gascoigne might say what she would—­all Avonsbridge might say what it would—­she would never open her lips more.