A few minutes elapsed before Miss Halcombe dismissed the maid and came back to me.  She, too, looked flurried and unsettled now.

“We have arranged all that is necessary, Mr. Hartright,” she said.  “We have understood each other, as friends should, and we may go back at once to the house.  To tell you the truth, I am uneasy about Laura.  She has sent to say she wants to see me directly, and the maid reports that her mistress is apparently very much agitated by a letter that she has received this morning—­the same letter, no doubt, which I sent on to the house before we came here.”

We retraced our steps together hastily along the shrubbery path.  Although Miss Halcombe had ended all that she thought it necessary to say on her side, I had not ended all that I wanted to say on mine.  From the moment when I had discovered that the expected visitor at Limmeridge was Miss Fairlie’s future husband, I had felt a bitter curiosity, a burning envious eagerness, to know who he was.  It was possible that a future opportunity of putting the question might not easily offer, so I risked asking it on our way back to the house.

“Now that you are kind enough to tell me we have understood each other, Miss Halcombe,” I said, “now that you are sure of my gratitude for your forbearance and my obedience to your wishes, may I venture to ask who”—­(I hesitated—­I had forced myself to think of him, but it was harder still to speak of him, as her promised husband)—­“who the gentleman engaged to Miss Fairlie is?”

Her mind was evidently occupied with the message she had received from her sister.  She answered in a hasty, absent way—­

“A gentleman of large property in Hampshire.”

Hampshire!  Anne Catherick’s native place.  Again, and yet again, the woman in white.  There was a fatality in it.

“And his name?” I said, as quietly and indifferently as I could.

“Sir Percival Glyde.”

Sir—­Sir Percival!  Anne Catherick’s question—­that suspicious question about the men of the rank of Baronet whom I might happen to know—­had hardly been dismissed from my mind by Miss Halcombe’s return to me in the summer-house, before it was recalled again by her own answer.  I stopped suddenly, and looked at her.

“Sir Percival Glyde,” she repeated, imagining that I had not heard her former reply.

“Knight, or Baronet?” I asked, with an agitation that I could hide no longer.

She paused for a moment, and then answered, rather coldly—­

“Baronet, of course.”

XI

Not a word more was said, on either side, as we walked back to the house.  Miss Halcombe hastened immediately to her sister’s room, and I withdrew to my studio to set in order all of Mr. Fairlie’s drawings that I had not yet mounted and restored before I resigned them to the care of other hands.  Thoughts that I had hitherto restrained, thoughts that made my position harder than ever to endure, crowded on me now that I was alone.