Having disclosed these particulars, Mrs. Vanstone requested that they might be kept a secret between her correspondent and herself.  She had felt unwilling to mention her suspicions to Miss Garth, until those suspicions had been confirmed—­and she now recoiled, with even greater reluctance, from allowing her daughters to be in any way alarmed about her.  It would be best to dismiss the subject for the present, and to wait hopefully till the summer came.  In the meantime they would all, she trusted, be happily reunited on the twenty-third of the month, which Mr. Vanstone had fixed on as the day for their return.  With this intimation, and with the customary messages, the letter, abruptly and confusedly, came to an end.

For the first few minutes, a natural sympathy for Mrs. Vanstone was the only feeling of which Miss Garth was conscious after she had laid the letter down.  Ere long, however, there rose obscurely on her mind a doubt which perplexed and distressed her.  Was the explanation which she had just read really as satisfactory and as complete as it professed to be?  Testing it plainly by facts, surely not.

On the morning of her departure, Mrs. Vanstone had unquestionably left the house in good spirits.  At her age, and in her state of health, were good spirits compatible with such an errand to a physician as the errand on which she was bent?  Then, again, had that letter from New Orleans, which had necessitated Mr. Vanstone’s departure, no share in occasioning his wife’s departure as well?  Why, otherwise, had she looked up so eagerly the moment her daughter mentioned the postmark.  Granting the avowed motive for her journey—­did not her manner, on the morning when the letter was opened, and again on the morning of departure, suggest the existence of some other motive which her letter kept concealed?

If it was so, the conclusion that followed was a very distressing one.  Mrs. Vanstone, feeling what was due to her long friendship with Miss Garth, had apparently placed the fullest confidence in her, on one subject, by way of unsuspiciously maintaining the strictest reserve toward her on another.  Naturally frank and straightforward in all her own dealings, Miss Garth shrank from plainly pursuing her doubts to this result:  a want of loyalty toward her tried and valued friend seemed implied in the mere dawning of it on her mind.

She locked up the letter in her desk; roused herself resolutely to attend to the passing interests of the day; and went downstairs again to the breakfast-room.  Amid many uncertainties, this at least was clear, Mr. and Mrs. Vanstone were coming back on the twenty-third of the month.  Who could say what new revelations might not come back with them?

CHAPTER IV.