My disappointment was extreme, and many weeks of constrained silence passed before I received the promised letter from Captain Wentworth—­so gloomy, so incomprehensible, so portentous, that it filled me with despair.  In this letter he spoke of obstacles between us—­in which blood bore part—­of the wreck of all earthly happiness for him—­perchance for me.  Yet he conjured me to be calm and patient, as he could not be, and alluded to my silence as conclusive of his misery.  He referred frequently to the letter he had intrusted to the care of Gregory as explanatory of all that might otherwise seem inexplicable—­that letter at rest beneath the dark waters of the Bayou Noir—­if—­if, indeed!  But no! not even of Gregory could I harbor on slight grounds such suspicions.  “Let the devil himself have the full benefit of—­doubt!” says Rabelais.  I wrote to Wentworth that I would come and make all plain, as he desired, in June.

Suffering severely myself, I saw clouds gathering and rising around a happy household that for a time drew me from the depths of my own affliction in the vain effort to solace their woes.

Father and son and infant in one house, wife and imbecile daughter in another, at last fell at one dread swoop.  To dishonor was added the crime of suicide, and poverty and breaking hearts were there, for the heritage of Beauseincourt was, by reason of debt and mismanagement, to pass, after the death of its master, into strange hands—­the cruel hands of creditors!

Walter La Vigne was dead, and the succession of Bellevue passed over the daughters of the house, to vest in a distant kinsman.  He came, toward the last of my stay, to take his own; and, unexpectedly, George Gaston, the playmate of my childhood, the lover of my first youth, stood before me in the residuary legatee of Armand La Vigne!

His advent was a revelation of my secret, through the necessity of surprise; and as, when the banquet is announced and the ball draws near its close, the maskers, so far unknown to each other, lay by their disguises, glad to be so relieved, draw breath and clasp hands once more in the freedom of social reality, so I, who had played too long a weary part, felt a new life infused into my veins when my mask was suddenly laid aside, and the necessity of disguise was over.

The time was so near at hand now, I felt, when I could claim my own from Bainrothe, and cast off all shackles of guardianship and minority, that I no longer feared the consequences of this revelation.  In September we should meet on new ground.  I, no more a minor, would be beyond the reach of his subtle mastery; and, until then—­the time assigned for the expiration of his year of trust—­he would remain in Europe, with the wide sea between us, and little probability of information through the medium of public rumor.

I would be secret, cautious, abide in the shadow, until the hour arrived to emerge therefrom, and, with the aid of God and Wardour Wentworth, defeat his schemes and vindicate the truth!