Mr. Leigh, believing that his strength was really failing more and more, hastened his son’s departure, that the voyage might be made before his increasing weakness should set it aside; his parting from Maurice, therefore, he dreaded as a final one.  Mrs. Costello had vaguer, but equally oppressive forebodings.  She saw that in all probability a few weeks longer would find her peaceful home deserted, and herself and Lucia fugitives.  Even if Maurice, transported into a new world with new interests and incalculably brighter prospects, should still retain his affection for them—­and that she scarcely doubted—­how could he ever again be to them what he had been? far less, what she had hoped he might be?

When Maurice returned, earlier than they expected, from the town, he found them still together.  Mrs. Costello soon rose to return home, having seen to the last possible arrangement for the traveller’s comfort.  He proposed to accompany her, and say good-bye to Lucia, and they left the house together.

“I want to ask you to do me another kindness yet,” he said, as soon as they had left the house.  “My father, I am sure, will not tell me the truth about himself; he will be terribly lonely, and I am afraid of his health suffering more than it has done.  He thinks it a duty to my mother, that I should go to England now; but it will certainly be my duty to him to come back, at all risks, if he feels my being away as much as I fear he will.”

“You may at least depend upon one thing,” she answered, “we will do all we can to take care of him.”

“Thank you, that I know.  But, Mrs. Costello, I should be so glad if you would write to me, and so give me the comfort of knowing exactly how he is.”

“Certainly I will.  You shall have a regular bulletin every mail if you like.”

“Indeed, I should like it.  And you will send me news also of yourself?”

Mrs. Costello sighed.

“I am forgetting,” she said, “and making promises I may not be able to keep.  I do not know how long I may be here, or where I may be three months hence.”

Maurice looked at her in surprise.  That she, who for twelve years had never quitted her home for a single night, should speak thus of leaving it without visible cause or preparation, seemed almost incredible.

She answered his look.

“Yes, I am serious.  A dreadful trouble is threatening me, and to save myself and Lucia, I may have to go away.  No one knows anything of it.  Now that you are leaving us, I dare say so much to you.”

“This, then, is why you have changed so, lately?  Could not you have trusted me before?”

“It would have been useless; no one can help me.”

Her voice seemed changed and broken, and she had grown ashy pale in alluding to the dreadful subject.  Maurice could not bear to leave her in this uncertainty.

“Dear Mrs. Costello,” he said, “if you had a son you would let him share your anxieties.  I have so long been used to think of you almost as a mother, that I feel as if I had a kind of right to your confidence; and I cannot imagine any trouble in which you would be better without friends than with them.”