“The doubt pointing to Edwin Fennel in the affair is his suddenly decamping,” continued Major Smith. “It was quite impromptu, you say, Miss Preen?”
“Quite so. I feel sure he had no thought of going away in the morning; and he did not receive any letter from England later, which was the excuse he gave Nancy for departing. Rely upon it that what he heard about the Mr. Dangerfield on the pier drove him away.”
“Well, that looks suspicious, you see.”
“Oh yes, I do see it,” I answered, unable to conceal the pain I felt. “It was a bitter calamity, Major Smith, when Nancy married him.”
“I’ll make a few cautious inquiries in the town, and try to find out if there’s anything against him in secret, or if any man named Dangerfield has been in the place and got into a mess. But, indeed, I don’t altogether see that it could apply to him,” concluded the major after a pause. “One can’t well go under two names in the same town; and every one knows him as Edwin Fennel.—Here they are, some of them, coming back!” And when the wanderers were close up, they found Major Smith arguing with me about the architecture of the castle.
Ten o’clock. Time for bed. I am in no haste to go, for I don’t sleep as well as I used to.
A thought has lately sometimes crossed me that this miserable trouble worries me more than it ought to do. “Accept it as your cross, and yield to it, Lavinia,” says Mary Carimon to me. But I cannot yield to it; that is, I cannot in the least diminish the anxiety which always clings to me, or forget the distress and dread that lie upon me like a shadow. I know that my life has been on the whole an easy life—that during all the years I spent at Selby Court I never had any trouble; I know that crosses do come to us all, earlier or later, and that I ought not to be surprised that “no new thing has happened to me,” the world being full of such experiences. I suppose it is because I have been so exempt from care, that I feel this the more.
Half-past ten! just half-an-hour writing these last few lines and thinking! Time I put up. I wonder when I shall hear from Nancy?
VI.
A curious phase, taken in conjunction with what was to follow, now occurred in the history. Miss Preen began to experience a nervous dread at going into the Petite Maison Rouge at night.