Anne had hitherto not shared the conviction felt by most other persons who were brought into contact with Hester Dethridge, that the woman’s mind was deranged.  After what she had just seen, however, the general impression became her impression too.  She had thought of putting certain questions to Hester, when they were left together, as to the origin of the fire.  Reflection decided her on saying nothing, for that night at least.  She crossed the passage, and entered the spare room—­the room which she had declined to occupy on her arrival at the cottage, and which she was obliged to sleep in now.

She was instantly struck by a change in the disposition of the furniture of the room.

The bed had been moved.  The head—­set, when she had last seen it, against the side wall of the cottage—­was placed now against the partition wall which separated the room from Geoffrey’s room.  This new arrangement had evidently been effected with a settled purpose of some sort.  The hook in the ceiling which supported the curtains (the bed, unlike the bed in the other room, having no canopy attached to it) had been moved so as to adapt itself to the change that had been made.  The chairs and the washhand-stand, formerly placed against the partition wall, were now, as a matter of necessity, shifted over to the vacant space against the side wall of the cottage.  For the rest, no other alteration was visible in any part of the room.

In Anne’s situation, any event not immediately intelligible on the face of it, was an event to be distrusted.  Was there a motive for the change in the position of the bed?  And was it, by any chance, a motive in which she was concerned?

The doubt had barely occurred to her, before a startling suspicion succeeded it.  Was there some secret purpose to be answered by making her sleep in the spare room?  Did the question which the servant had heard Geoffrey put to Hester, on the previous night, refer to this?  Had the fire which had so unaccountably caught the curtains in her own room, been, by any possibility, a fire purposely kindled, to force her out?

She dropped into the nearest chair, faint with horror, as those three questions forced themselves in rapid succession on her mind.

After waiting a little, she recovered self-possession enough to recognize the first plain necessity of putting her suspicions to the test.  It was possible that her excited fancy had filled her with a purely visionary alarm.  For all she knew to the contrary, there might be some undeniably sufficient reason for changing the position of the bed.  She went out, and knocked at the door of Hester Dethridge’s room.

“I want to speak to you,” she said.

Hester came out.  Anne pointed to the spare room, and led the way to it.  Hester followed her.

“Why have you changed the place of the bed,” she asked, “from the wall there, to the wall here?”

Stolidly submissive to the question, as she had been stolidly submissive to the fire, Hester Dethridge wrote her reply.  On all other occasions she was accustomed to look the persons to whom she offered her slate steadily in the face.  Now, for the first time, she handed it to Anne with her eyes on the floor.  The one line written contained no direct answer:  the words were these: