I started up from the ottoman before Miss Halcombe could pronounce the next words.  A thrill of the same feeling which ran through me when the touch was laid upon my shoulder on the lonely high-road chilled me again.

There stood Miss Fairlie, a white figure, alone in the moonlight; in her attitude, in the turn of her head, in her complexion, in the shape of her face, the living image, at that distance and under those circumstances, of the woman in white!  The doubt which had troubled my mind for hours and hours past flashed into conviction in an instant.  That “something wanting” was my own recognition of the ominous likeness between the fugitive from the asylum and my pupil at Limmeridge House.

“You see it!” said Miss Halcombe.  She dropped the useless letter, and her eyes flashed as they met mine.  “You see it now, as my mother saw it eleven years since!”

“I see it—­more unwillingly than I can say.  To associate that forlorn, friendless, lost woman, even by an accidental likeness only, with Miss Fairlie, seems like casting a shadow on the future of the bright creature who stands looking at us now.  Let me lose the impression again as soon as possible.  Call her in, out of the dreary moonlight—­pray call her in!”

“Mr. Hartright, you surprise me.  Whatever women may be, I thought that men, in the nineteenth century, were above superstition.”

“Pray call her in!”

“Hush, hush!  She is coming of her own accord.  Say nothing in her presence.  Let this discovery of the likeness be kept a secret between you and me.  Come in, Laura, come in, and wake Mrs. Vesey with the piano.  Mr. Hartright is petitioning for some more music, and he wants it, this time, of the lightest and liveliest kind.”

IX

So ended my eventful first day at Limmeridge House.

Miss Halcombe and I kept our secret.  After the discovery of the likeness no fresh light seemed destined to break over the mystery of the woman in white.  At the first safe opportunity Miss Halcombe cautiously led her half-sister to speak of their mother, of old times, and of Anne Catherick.  Miss Fairlie’s recollections of the little scholar at Limmeridge were, however, only of the most vague and general kind.  She remembered the likeness between herself and her mother’s favourite pupil, as something which had been supposed to exist in past times; but she did not refer to the gift of the white dresses, or to the singular form of words in which the child had artlessly expressed her gratitude for them.  She remembered that Anne had remained at Limmeridge for a few months only, and had then left it to go back to her home in Hampshire; but she could not say whether the mother and daughter had ever returned, or had ever been heard of afterwards.  No further search, on Miss Halcombe’s part, through the few letters of Mrs. Fairlie’s writing which she had left unread, assisted in clearing up the uncertainties