“I will come back again, love, in an hour or less,” I said.  “The worst is over for to-day.  Keep yourself quiet and fear nothing.”

“Is the key in the door, Marian?  Can I lock it on the inside?”

“Yes, here is the key.  Lock the door, and open it to nobody until I come upstairs again.”

I kissed her and left her.  It was a relief to me as I walked away to hear the key turned in the lock, and to know that the door was at her own command.

VIII

June 19th.—­I had only got as far as the top of the stairs when the locking of Laura’s door suggested to me the precaution of also locking my own door, and keeping the key safely about me while I was out of the room.  My journal was already secured with other papers in the table drawer, but my writing materials were left out.  These included a seal bearing the common device of two doves drinking out of the same cup, and some sheets of blotting-paper, which had the impression on them of the closing lines of my writing in these pages traced during the past night.  Distorted by the suspicion which had now become a part of myself, even such trifles as these looked too dangerous to be trusted without a guard—­even the locked table drawer seemed to be not sufficiently protected in my absence until the means of access to it had been carefully secured as well.

I found no appearance of any one having entered the room while I had been talking with Laura.  My writing materials (which I had given the servant instructions never to meddle with) were scattered over the table much as usual.  The only circumstance in connection with them that at all struck me was that the seal lay tidily in the tray with the pencils and the wax.  It was not in my careless habits (I am sorry to say) to put it there, neither did I remember putting it there.  But as I could not call to mind, on the other hand, where else I had thrown it down, and as I was also doubtful whether I might not for once have laid it mechanically in the right place, I abstained from adding to the perplexity with which the day’s events had filled my mind by troubling it afresh about a trifle.  I locked the door, put the key in my pocket, and went downstairs.

Madame Fosco was alone in the hall looking at the weather-glass.

“Still falling,” she said.  “I am afraid we must expect more rain.”

Her face was composed again to its customary expression and its customary colour.  But the hand with which she pointed to the dial of the weather-glass still trembled.

Could she have told her husband already that she had overheard Laura reviling him, in my company, as a “spy?” My strong suspicion that she must have told him, my irresistible dread (all the more overpowering from its very vagueness) of the consequences which might follow, my fixed conviction, derived from various little self-betrayals which women notice in each other, that Madame Fosco, in spite of her well-assumed external civility, had not forgiven her niece for innocently standing between her and the legacy of ten thousand pounds—­all rushed upon my mind together, all impelled me to speak in the vain hope of using my own influence and my own powers of persuasion for the atonement of Laura’s offence.