Looking in the glass, she noticed Anne’s face reflected behind her, and started at the sight of it.

“What is the matter?” she asked.  “Your face frightens me.”

It was useless to prolong the pain of the inevitable misunderstanding between them.  The one course to take was to silence all further inquiries then and there.  Strongly as she felt this, Anne’s inbred loyalty to Blanche still shrank from deceiving her to her face.  “I might write it,” she thought.  “I can’t say it, with Arnold Brinkworth in the same house with her!” Write it?  As she reconsidered the word, a sudden idea struck her.  She opened the bedroom door, and led the way back into the sitting-room.

“Gone again!” exclaimed Blanche, looking uneasily round the empty room.  “Anne! there’s something so strange in all this, that I neither can, nor will, put up with your silence any longer.  It’s not just, it’s not kind, to shut me out of your confidence, after we have lived together like sisters all our lives!”

Anne sighed bitterly, and kissed her on the forehead.  “You shall know all I can tell you—­all I dare tell you,” she said, gently.  “Don’t reproach me.  It hurts me more than you think.”

She turned away to the side table, and came back with a letter in her hand.  “Read that,” she said, and handed it to Blanche.

Blanche saw her own name, on the address, in the handwriting of Anne.

“What does this mean?” she asked.

“I wrote to you, after Sir Patrick had left me,” Anne replied.  “I meant you to have received my letter to-morrow, in time to prevent any little imprudence into which your anxiety might hurry you.  All that I can say to you is said there.  Spare me the distress of speaking.  Read it, Blanche.”

Blanche still held the letter, unopened.

“A letter from you to me! when we are both together, and both alone in the same room!  It’s worse than formal, Anne!  It’s as if there was a quarrel between us.  Why should it distress you to speak to me?”

Anne’s eyes dropped to the ground.  She pointed to the letter for the second time.

Blanche broke the seal.

She passed rapidly over the opening sentences, and devoted all her attention to the second paragraph.

“And now, my love, you will expect me to atone for the surprise and distress that I have caused you, by explaining what my situation really is, and by telling you all my plans for the future.  Dearest Blanche! don’t think me untrue to the affection we bear toward each other—­don’t think there is any change in my heart toward you—­believe only that I am a very unhappy woman, and that I am in a position which forces me, against my own will, to be silent about myself.  Silent even to you, the sister of my love—­the one person in the world who is dearest to me!  A time may come when I shall be able to open my heart to you.  Oh, what good it will do me! what a relief it will