“Are you going to remain here?” asked Mr. Markland.

“I came to spend a little while alone in this sweet place, but I will go back to the house if you wish it,” she replied.

“Perhaps you had better do so.  I saw a strange man between this and the main road, and he seemed as if he desired to avoid observation.”

Fanny started, and looked up, with an expression of fear, into her father’s face.  The origin of that look Mr. Markland did not rightly conjecture.  She arose at once, and said—­

“Let us go home.”

But few words passed between father and daughter on the way, and their brief intercourse was marked by a singular embarrassment on both sides.

How little suspicion of the real truth was in the mind of Mr. Markland!  Nothing was farther from his thoughts than the idea that Fanny had just received a letter from Mr. Lyon, and that the man he had seen was the messenger by whom the missive had been conveyed to the summer-house.  A minute earlier, and that letter would have come into his hands.  How instantly would a knowledge of its contents have affected all the purposes that were now leading him on with almost the blindness of infatuation.  The man he was trusting so implicitly would have instantly stood revealed as a scheming, unprincipled adventurer.  In such estimation, at least, he must have been held by Mr. Markland, and his future actions would have been governed by that estimate.

The answer to Fanny’s earnest, almost peremptory demand, to be released from the injunction not to tell her parents of Mr. Lyon’s return, was in her possession, and the instant she could get away to her own room, she tore the letter open.  The reader already knows its contents.  The effect upon her was paralizing.  He had said that she was in freedom to speak, but the consequences portrayed were too fearful to contemplate.  In freedom?  No!  Instead of loosing the cords with which he had bound her spirit, he had only drawn them more tightly.  She was in freedom to speak, but the very first word she uttered would sound the knell of her young heart’s fondest hopes.  How, then, could she speak that word?  Lyon had not miscalculated the effect of his letter on the inexperienced, fond young girl, around whose innocent heart he had woven a spell of enchantment.  Most adroitly had he seemed to leave her free to act from her own desires, while he had made that action next to impossible.

How rapidly, sometimes, does the young mind gain premature strength when subjected to strong trial.  Little beyond an artless child was Fanny Markland when she first met the fascinating young stranger; and now she was fast growing into a deep-feeling, strong-thinking woman.  Hitherto she had leaned with tender confidence on her parents, and walked the paths lovingly where they led the way.  Now she was moving, with unaided footsteps, along a new and rugged road, that led she knew not whither; for clouds and darkness were in the forward distance.  At every step, she found a new strength and a new power of endurance growing up in her young spirit.  Thought, too, was becoming clearer and stronger.  The mature woman had suddenly taken the place of the shrinking girl.