Sir Patrick handed the newspaper silently to Arnold.  It was plain to any one who knew Anne Silvester’s story that those were the words which had found their fatal way to her in her place of rest.  The inference that followed seemed to be hardly less clear.  But one intelligible object, in the opinion of Sir Patrick, could be at the end of her journey to the north.  The deserted woman had rallied the last relics of her old energy—­and had devoted herself to the desperate purpose of stopping the marriage of Mrs. Glenarm.

Blanche was the first to break the silence.

“It seems like a fatality,” she said.  “Perpetual failure!  Perpetual disappointment!  Are Anne and I doomed never to meet again?”

She looked at her uncle.  Sir Patrick showed none of his customary cheerfulness in the face of disaster.

“She has promised to write to Mr. Crum,” he said.  “And Mr. Crum has promised to let us know when he hears from her.  That is the only prospect before us.  We must accept it as resignedly as we can.”

Blanche wandered out listlessly among the flowers in the conservatory.  Sir Patrick made no secret of the impression produced upon him by Mr. Crum’s letter, when he and Arnold were left alone.

“There is no denying,” he said, “that matters have taken a very serious turn.  My plans and calculations are all thrown out.  It is impossible to foresee what new mischief may not come of it, if those two women meet; or what desperate act Delamayn may not commit, if he finds himself driven to the wall.  As things are, I own frankly I don’t know what to do next.  A great light of the Presbyterian Church,” he added, with a momentary outbreak of his whimsical humor, “once declared, in my hearing, that the invention of printing was nothing more or less than a proof of the intellectual activity of the Devil.  Upon my honor, I feel for the first time in my life inclined to agree with him.”

He mechanically took up the Glasgow journal, which Arnold had laid aside, while he spoke.

“What’s this!” he exclaimed, as a name caught his eye in the first line of the newspaper at which he happened to look.  “Mrs. Glenarm again!  Are they turning the iron-master’s widow into a public character?”

There the name of the widow was, unquestionably; figuring for the second time in type, in a letter of the gossiping sort, supplied by an “Occasional Correspondent,” and distinguished by the title of “Sayings and Doings in the North.”  After tattling pleasantly of the prospects of the shooting season, of the fashions from Paris, of an accident to a tourist, and of a scandal in the Scottish Kirk, the writer proceeded to the narrative of a case of interest, relating to a marriage in the sphere known (in the language of footmen) as the sphere of “high life.”

Considerable sensation (the correspondent announced) had been caused in Perth and its neighborhood, by the exposure of an anonymous attempt at extortion, of which a lady of distinction had lately been made the object.  As her name had already been publicly mentioned in an application to the magistrates, there could be no impropriety in stating that the lady in question was Mrs. Glenarm—­whose approaching union with the Honorable Geoffrey Delamayn was alluded to in another column of the journal.