be!  For the present, I must be silent.  For the present, we must be parted.  God knows what it costs me to write this.  I think of the dear old days that are gone; I remember how I promised your mother to be a sister to you, when her kind eyes looked at me, for the last time—­your mother, who was an angel from heaven to mine! All this comes back on me now, and breaks my heart.  But it must be! my own Blanche, for the present, it must be!  I will write often—­I will think of you, my darling, night and day, till a happier future unites us again.  God bless you, my dear one!  And God help me!”

Blanche silently crossed the room to the sofa on which Anne was sitting, and stood there for a moment, looking at her.  She sat down, and laid her head on Anne’s shoulder.  Sorrowfully and quietly, she put the letter into her bosom—­and took Anne’s hand, and kissed it.

“All my questions are answered, dear.  I will wait your time.”

It was simply, sweetly, generously said.

Anne burst into tears.

* * * * *

The rain still fell, but the storm was dying away.

Blanche left the sofa, and, going to the window, opened the shutters to look out at the night.  She suddenly came back to Anne.

“I see lights,” she said—­“the lights of a carriage coming up out of the darkness of the moor.  They are sending after me, from Windygates.  Go into t he bedroom.  It’s just possible Lady Lundie may have come for me herself.”

The ordinary relations of the two toward each other were completely reversed.  Anne was like a child in Blanche’s hands.  She rose, and withdrew.

Left alone, Blanche took the letter out of her bosom, and read it again, in the interval of waiting for the carriage.

The second reading confirmed her in a resolution which she had privately taken, while she had been sitting by Anne on the sofa—­a resolution destined to lead to far more serious results in the future than any previsions of hers could anticipate.  Sir Patrick was the one person she knew on whose discretion and experience she could implicitly rely.  She determined, in Anne’s own interests, to take her uncle into her confidence, and to tell him all that had happened at the inn “I’ll first make him forgive me,” thought Blanche.  “And then I’ll see if he thinks as I do, when I tell him about Anne.”

The carriage drew up at the door; and Mrs. Inchbare showed in—­not Lady Lundie, but Lady Lundie’s maid.

The woman’s account of what had happened at Windygates was simple enough.  Lady Lundie had, as a matter of course, placed the right interpretation on Blanche’s abrupt departure in the pony-chaise, and had ordered the carriage, with the firm determination of following her step-daughter herself.  But the agitations and anxieties of the day had proved too much for her.  She had been seized by one of the attacks of giddiness to which she was always subject