It was all so inexplicable that even the very servants who know us, their masters and mistresses, better than we know each other, could draw no conclusions, and the prevailing amazement downstairs found vent in ejaculations of "Miss Maud! Miss Maud of all people! Now if it had been Leonore"—but the speaker, a pert young thing, was sharply called to order for impudence—"'Mrs. Stubbs' then,—the name ain't so pretty she need have it always tagged on to her"—with a giggle—"she's got it in her to run away with any number of 'em, she has. And Val was her one, Mary and me thought. But, Lor, it's looks that tells: and pretty as she is, Leonore—Mrs. Stubbs," giggling again, "can't stand up to her that's Mrs. Val now. See her in her weddin' dress—my! We little thought she wasn't never to put it on in earnest, when we was let to have a sight of her that day it come home. A real treat it was!"
Maud's first letter was a triumph of equivocal diplomacy. She did not utter a single verbal falsehood, and without such contrived to blindfold every one. Her feelings towards her affianced husband had changed of late—("of late" is an elastic term)—she had "learnt to value the lifelong devotion of her dear Val,"—(when learned was again left to the imagination)—and "seeing no course left but to break with Paul before it was too late," she had fled to avoid a scene which would have only given him pain, and not altered her resolution.
"Had you any sort of premonition of this, Paul?" Sue inquired in tremulous accents, an hour having elapsed since the letter came.
"She put one or two rather strange questions to me yesterday;" hesitated he.
"Might I ask—could you tell me what they were?"
"I think I would rather not. It can do no good now." He spoke gently, but she could not press the point.
"She knows;" said Paul, to himself. "How she knows I cannot fathom; but all this about the change in her feelings is only a blind. She knows; and though she has given me my release, I can never avail myself of it."
He left the Abbey within the hour.
And this was now a story three months old, and Maud was coming to say "Good-bye" before beginning a new life in another land.