Clementina gave a short, sharp cry. "That!" she said in a hoarse whisper, "as bad as that!" But she did not faint or fall, she stood in her place quite still and rigid, only her eyes were wilder than before, and her cheeks were blanched now, not burning.
"You forced the secret from me," said Miss Arthur, in a terrified voice. "I did not wish to tell it, but you forced me."
"You have done no harm," said Clementina; but she spoke as if in a dream, not knowing what she said.
At that moment the door-bell rang sharply, and Adams, who had ridden hard, handed a letter to the servant, addressed to Miss Arthur, with "Haste" scrawled in a hurried and almost illegible hand on the cover. It was from Mrs. Kinniside, earnestly beseeching Miss Arthur to still keep the secret she had kept so long, and especially from her daughter, who she had every reason to believe, and fear, would make her way over to the Holm, and endeavor to see her. The girl's excitable imagination had been set on fire, she said, and Miss Arthur knew what that meant; and unless kept in check mischief of the gravest kind would follow. If she did go to the house, would Miss Arthur resolutely refuse to see her? or if she did by chance meet her, would she abstain from all confidences with her? She was in a frame of mind not to be trusted, and, the barriers once broken down, who could tell what would be the end?
Poor Mrs. Kinniside wrote fervently; and even Miss Arthur, in all her nervousness and pre-occupation, could see the anguish which had dictated her letter.
"Too late!" she said, half to herself; "and yet," balancing again,. "Sir James Walshe ought to know, and the sister ought to know, too; but I wish that it had not been left to me to do—I wish that I had been spared!"
Clementina took Miss Arthur's hand—it was like a crumpled Autumn leaf, so thin and brown and withered was it — and silently pressed it in her own; then, without another word, with no adieus, no regrets, no spoken sign at all, she turned and left the room, and soon was in the lumbering old chaise again, and on her way home to her mother, and her fate.
Mrs. Kinniside was sitting in the drawing-room, alone, when she returned; Sir James and Bessie had not come back yet from the village; and one glance at her face, as Clementina passed through the open window from the lawn, told her all.
"You have been to the Holm?" she said, quietly; but her thin lips were parched, and her well-trained hands were trembling.
"Yes," answered Clementina, "I have seen Miss Arthur, and I know all."
"You have been diligent to seek after your own destruction, Clementina," said her mother, coldly. "Now that you have found it, perhaps you will agree with me that it would have been better to have left things in wiser hands, and stronger, than your own; and that you have simply brought shame and sorrow on your head, which I would have spared you."
"No, mamma; on the contrary, I have found that I can keep shame and sorrow from the head of a good and honorable man," returned Clementina, the stony mask with which her face had been set for so many hours passing off into a wild but lovely kind of holiness, that made her look like a saint in the ecstacy of a martyrdom.
"What do you intend to do, Clementina?" said her mother, in the same cold and indifferent manner.
"Tell Sir James what I know, and release him from his engagement."
