Janet looked distressed as she said, ’Yes, you must go, mother.  But I don’t know what I shall do without you.  I think I shall run in to Mrs. Pettifer, and ask her to come and stay with me while you’re away.  I’m sure she will.’

At twelve o’clock, Janet, having seen her mother in the coach that was to carry her to Thurston, called, on her way back, at Mrs. Pettifer’s, but found, to her great disappointment, that her old friend was gone out for the day.  So she wrote on a leaf of her pocket-book an urgent request that Mrs. Pettifer would come and stay with her while her mother was away; and, desiring the servant-girl to give it to her mistress as soon as she came home, walked on to the Vicarage to sit with Mrs. Crewe, thinking to relieve in this way the feeling of desolateness and undefined fear that was taking possession of her on being left alone for the first time since that great crisis in her life.  And Mrs. Crewe, too, was not at home!

Janet, with a sense of discouragement for which she rebuked herself as childish, walked sadly home again; and when she entered the vacant dining-room, she could not help bursting into tears.  It is such vague undefinable states of susceptibility as this—­states of excitement or depression, half mental, half physical—­that determine many a tragedy in women’s lives.  Janet could scarcely eat anything at her solitary dinner:  she tried to fix her attention on a book in vain; she walked about the garden, and felt the very sunshine melancholy.

Between four and five o’clock, old Mr. Pittman called, and joined her in the garden, where she had been sitting for some time under one of the great apple-trees, thinking how Robert, in his best moods, used to take little Mamsey to look at the cucumbers, or to see the Alderney cow with its calf in the paddock.  The tears and sobs had come again at these thoughts; and when Mr. Pittman approached her, she was feeling languid and exhausted.  But the old gentleman’s sight and sensibility were obtuse, and, to Janet’s satisfaction, he showed no consciousness that she was in grief.

‘I have a task to impose upon you, Mrs. Dempster,’ he said, with a certain toothless pomposity habitual to him:  ’I want you to look over those letters again in Dempster’s bureau, and see if you can find one from Poole about the mortgage on those houses at Dingley.  It will be worth twenty pounds, if you can find it; and I don’t know where it can be, if it isn’t among those letters in the bureau.  I’ve looked everywhere at the office for it.  I’m going home now, but I’ll call again tomorrow, if you’ll be good enough to look in the meantime.’