“I suppose I did.”
“And will you be content not to know?”
“Perhaps I shall. For I think I have guessed something of the truth already.”
Vernon’s eyes glowed with passionate yearning as they met hers.
“Impossible!” said he, below his breath. “And yet—you women have such quick perception. If it is true that you know,” he went on, in a firmer and sterner voice, “I shall never dare to speak to you again.”
Olivia was trembling with excitement. It was not true that she was mistress of the secret, but there a dim intuition in her mind which bewildered, sometimes almost maddened, her. She did not attempt to answer Vernon Brander; but drawing sharply away from him the hand he still held, she abruptly wished him “good-night,” and putting the church keys on the wall beside him, ran away up the lane as fast as her active feet could carry her.
When Olivia reached home she was greeted by severe silence on the part of her step-mother; while her father, who was usually so careful to try to make amends for any unkindness of his wife’s by little unobtrusive attentions, carefully avoided her. The girl learned the reason of this treatment by remarks which Mrs. Denison, apropos of nothing, addressed from time to time to the children, warning them not to spoil their clothes, as they were the last they would have; telling them not to disturb their father, as he was writing to a gentleman to whom he owed money, asking for time in which to repay it; and finally admonishing them to be courteous to Olivia, as she could have the place sold up in a moment by insulting her father’s creditors; from which Olivia gathered that Fred Williams had already vented his spite on her father, and thereby prepared a most uncomfortable domestic life for her for some time to come.
She affected to take no notice of this treatment however, and did not even go in search of her father, thinking it would be better to let the first effects both of Fred’s and of his wife’s ill temper pass off before she spoke to him on the subject of the former’s addresses.
Telling Lucy to bring her supper up to her rooms, Olivia left the inharmonious family circle without bidding good-night to any one, and shut herself up in the east wing, where she could always draw the bolt of the outer door and be free from molestation. This she did, and being in a restless and excited state of mind, passed the next two hours in wandering from one room to the other, considering the mystery of Nellie Mitchell’s disappearance by the light of all the facts which, one by one, had come to her knowledge. She had become so accustomed to these rooms that it was only now and then that she remembered their connection with the murdered girl. To-night, however, the recollection startled her at every turn she took in her walks up and down. She seemed again to see the bedroom as it had looked on her first entrance, nearly six months ago, the rat scurrying down the curtains, the carpet lying in damp strings upon the floor, the mouldy books, and the dust lying thickly on chairs and mantelpiece. Everything had been changed since then; fresh hangings put to the bed; bright cretonne coverings to the old furniture; a new carpet, soft and warm, had replaced the damp rags. But on this particular evening her imagination seemed stronger than reality; as she walked from the one room to the other, she pictured to herself always that the chamber she was not in at the moment was in the state in which she had first seen it. These fancies grew so strong that they drove more serious thoughts out of her head; just when she wanted to be able to analyze the ideas which the day’s occurrences had suggested, she had lost all power of thinking connectedly; nothing but bewildering recollections of the words she had heard and the scenes she had witnessed could be got to occupy her excited mind.
She ran at last to one of her bedroom windows, threw it open, and looked out. It was dark now, for it was past nine o’clock, and the evening had turned wet. A light, drizzling summer rain was falling, and the sky was heavy with clouds. The outlook was so dreary that after a few minutes she shut the window, shivering, lit the candles, and tried to read. But she was in such a nervous state that she uttered a little scream when Lucy, bringing her supper, knocked at the outer door. Very much disgusted with herself for this display of feminine weakness, she would not even allow Lucy, who loved to linger about when she had any little service to perform for “Miss Olivia,” to stay for a few minutes’ chat. When the supper had been laid on the table in the outer room, and the bright little maid had run down stairs, Olivia did not, as usual, lock the outer door after her. She felt so unaccountably lonely and restless that she went into the little passage outside her two rooms, and set the outer door open, so as to feel that her connection with the rest of the human life in the house was not altogether severed. She even walked to the end of the corridor and glanced out through the large square window at the end, listening all the while for some sounds of household life downstairs. But in this east wing very little could be heard, and this evening everything seemed to Olivia to be unusually quiet.