In my doubt and perplexity, in my vague suspicion of something hidden which I was left to find by my own unaided efforts, I examined Miss Halcombe’s looks and manner for enlightenment.  Living in such intimacy as ours, no serious alteration could take place in any one of us which did not sympathetically affect the others.  The change in Miss Fairlie was reflected in her half-sister.  Although not a word escaped Miss Halcombe which hinted at an altered state of feeling towards myself, her penetrating eyes had contracted a new habit of always watching me.  Sometimes the look was like suppressed anger, sometimes like suppressed dread, sometimes like neither—­like nothing, in short, which I could understand.  A week elapsed, leaving us all three still in this position of secret constraint towards one another.  My situation, aggravated by the sense of my own miserable weakness and forgetfulness of myself, now too late awakened in me, was becoming intolerable.  I felt that I must cast off the oppression under which I was living, at once and for ever—­yet how to act for the best, or what to say first, was more than I could tell.

From this position of helplessness and humiliation I was rescued by Miss Halcombe.  Her lips told me the bitter, the necessary, the unexpected truth; her hearty kindness sustained me under the shock of hearing it; her sense and courage turned to its right use an event which threatened the worst that could happen, to me and to others, in Limmeridge House.

X

It was on a Thursday in the week, and nearly at the end of the third month of my sojourn in Cumberland.

In the morning, when I went down into the breakfast-room at the usual hour, Miss Halcombe, for the first time since I had known her, was absent from her customary place at the table.

Miss Fairlie was out on the lawn.  She bowed to me, but did not come in.  Not a word had dropped from my lips, or from hers, that could unsettle either of us—­and yet the same unacknowledged sense of embarrassment made us shrink alike from meeting one another alone.  She waited on the lawn, and I waited in the breakfast-room, till Mrs. Vesey or Miss Halcombe came in.  How quickly I should have joined her:  how readily we should have shaken hands, and glided into our customary talk, only a fortnight ago.

In a few minutes Miss Halcombe entered.  She had a preoccupied look, and she made her apologies for being late rather absently.

“I have been detained,” she said, “by a consultation with Mr. Fairlie on a domestic matter which he wished to speak to me about.”

Miss Fairlie came in from the garden, and the usual morning greeting passed between us.  Her hand struck colder to mine than ever.  She did not look at me, and she was very pale.  Even Mrs. Vesey noticed it when she entered the room a moment after.

“I suppose it is the change in the wind,” said the old lady.  “The winter is coming—­ah, my love, the winter is coming soon!”