"They are all over Markborough—and there is actually a copy of one of the anonymous letters—with dashes for the names—in the Post to-day?"
"I never hear these things!" said the Bishop, with an impatience which was meant, half for a scandal-mongering world, and half for himself. "But Barron has written me a perfectly incredible letter to-day. He seems to be the head and front of the whole business. I don't like Barron, and I don't like his letters!"
And throwing one slender leg over the other, while the tips of his long fingers met in a characteristic gesture, the little Bishop stared into the fire before him with an expression of mingled trouble and disgust.
Dornal, clearly, was no less unhappy. Drawing his chair close to the
Bishop's he described the manner in which the story had reached himself.
When he came to the curious facts concerning the diffusion and variety of
the anonymous letters, the Bishop interrupted him:
"And Barron tells me he knows nothing of these letters!"
"So I hear also."
"But, my dear Dornal, if he doesn't, it makes the thing inexplicable! Here we have a woman who comes home dying, and sees one person only—Henry Barron—to whom she tells her story."
The Bishop went through the points of Barron's narrative, and concluded:
"Then, on the top of this, after her death—her son denying all knowledge of his mother's history—comes this crop of extraordinary letters, showing, you tell me, an intimate acquaintance with the neighbourhood and the parties concerned. And yet Barron—the only person Mrs. Sabin saw—knows nothing of them! They are a mystery to him. But, my dear Dornal, how can they be?" The Bishop faced round with energy on his companion. "He must at least have talked incautiously before some one!"
Dornal agreed, but could put forward no suggestion of his own. He sat drooping by the Bishop's fire, his aspect expressing the deep distress he did not shape in words. That very distress, however, was what made his company so congenial to the much perturbed Bishop, who felt, moreover, a warmer affection for Dornal than for any other member of his Chapter.