“Let me go to-day,” I said bitterly.  “The sooner the better.”

“No, not to-day,” she replied.  “The only reason you can assign to Mr. Fairlie for your departure, before the end of your engagement, must be that an unforeseen necessity compels you to ask his permission to return at once to London.  You must wait till to-morrow to tell him that, at the time when the post comes in, because he will then understand the sudden change in your plans, by associating it with the arrival of a letter from London.  It is miserable and sickening to descend to deceit, even of the most harmless kind—­but I know Mr. Fairlie, and if you once excite his suspicions that you are trifling with him, he will refuse to release you.  Speak to him on Friday morning:  occupy yourself afterwards (for the sake of your own interests with your employer) in leaving your unfinished work in as little confusion as possible, and quit this place on Saturday.  It will be time enough then, Mr. Hartright, for you, and for all of us.”

Before I could assure her that she might depend on my acting in the strictest accordance with her wishes, we were both startled by advancing footsteps in the shrubbery.  Some one was coming from the house to seek for us!  I felt the blood rush into my cheeks and then leave them again.  Could the third person who was fast approaching us, at such a time and under such circumstances, be Miss Fairlie?

It was a relief—­so sadly, so hopelessly was my position towards her changed already—­it was absolutely a relief to me, when the person who had disturbed us appeared at the entrance of the summer-house, and proved to be only Miss Fairlie’s maid.

“Could I speak to you for a moment, miss?” said the girl, in rather a flurried, unsettled manner.

Miss Halcombe descended the steps into the shrubbery, and walked aside a few paces with the maid.

Left by myself, my mind reverted, with a sense of forlorn wretchedness which it is not in any words that I can find to describe, to my approaching return to the solitude and the despair of my lonely London home.  Thoughts of my kind old mother, and of my sister, who had rejoiced with her so innocently over my prospects in Cumberland—­thoughts whose long banishment from my heart it was now my shame and my reproach to realise for the first time—­came back to me with the loving mournfulness of old, neglected friends.  My mother and my sister, what would they feel when I returned to them from my broken engagement, with the confession of my miserable secret—­they who had parted from me so hopefully on that last happy night in the Hampstead cottage!

Anne Catherick again!  Even the memory of the farewell evening with my mother and my sister could not return to me now unconnected with that other memory of the moonlight walk back to London.  What did it mean?  Were that woman and I to meet once more?  It was possible, at the least.  Did she know that I lived in London?  Yes; I had told her so, either before or after that strange question of hers, when she had asked me so distrustfully if I knew many men of the rank of Baronet.  Either before or after—­my mind was not calm enough, then, to remember which.