It had been the intention of Mr. Willet to accept any courteous invitation extended by the family to pass a part of the evening with them; but, seeing how troubled Mrs. Markland was at the absence of her husband, he thought it better to decline entering the house, and wait for a better opportunity to make their more intimate acquaintance.  So he bade her a good evening, after answering what further inquiries she wished to make, and returned to his own home.

Aunt Grace was unusually excited by the information received through their neighbour, and fretted and talked in her excited way for some time; but nothing that she said elicited any reply from Mrs. Markland, who seemed half stupefied, and sat through the evening in a state of deep abstraction, answering only in brief sentences any remarks addressed to her.  It seemed to her as if her feet had wandered somehow into the mazes of a labyrinth, from which at each effort to get free she was only the more inextricably involved.  Her perceptions had lost their clearness, and, still worse, her confidence in them was diminishing.  Heretofore she had reposed all trust in her husband’s rational intelligence; and her woman’s nature had leaned upon him and clung to him as the vine to the oak.  As his judgment determined, her intuitions had approved.  Alas for her that this was no longer!  Hitherto she had walked by his side with a clear light upon their path.  She was ready to walk on still, and to walk bravely so far as herself was concerned, even though her straining eyes could not penetrate the cloudy veil that made all before her darkness and mystery.

Fanny, who had looked forward with a vague fear to her father’s return on that evening, felt relieved on hearing that he had gone to New York, for that would give sufficient time for him to receive a letter from Mr. Lyon.

Thus it was with the family of Mr. Markland on this particular occasion.  A crisis, looked for with trembling anxiety, seemed just at, hand; and yet it was still deferred—­leaving, at least in one bosom, a heart-sickness that made life itself almost a burden.

CHAPTER XXIII.

The close of the next day did not bring Mr. Markland, but only a hurried letter, saying that important business would probably keep him in New York a day or two longer.  A postscript to the letter read thus: 

“Mr. Elbridge will send you a deed of some warehouse property that I have sold.  Sign and return it by the bearer.”

If Mr. Markland had only said where a letter would reach him in New York, his wife would have lost no time in writing fully on the subject of Mr. Lyon’s conduct toward Fanny.  But, as there was great uncertainty about this, she felt that she could only await his return.  And now she blamed herself deeply for having kept her word to Fanny.  It was one of those cases, she saw, in which more evil was likely to flow from keeping a blind, almost extorted promise, than from breaking it.