[CHAPTER VII.]
AN AMAZING CONFESSION.
Within a month of the events recorded in the preceding chapter, Mrs. Jenwyn and her charge had left Combe Fenton. Anna had conceived a violent dislike to the place, and was restless till she got away from it. After her receipt of Guy Ormsby's letter, which Mrs. Jenwyn had arranged to have mailed from London, she never set foot on the sands of Carthew Bay. It is almost needless to state that the girl Fanny was left behind. She had heard of John Clisby's visit to Rosemount, and she needed no one to tell her why Mrs. Jenwyn had chosen to dispense with her services.
A few days before Anna's departure she received the news of her half brother's marriage. The ceremony had been solemnized at the British embassy at Naples, the bride being a Miss Madeline Fenwicke, whose name Anna seemed to remember as that of a visitor at Denham Lodge some three years previously.
In the course of the next four years, at the end of which period we take up their history afresh, Mrs. Jenwyn and her charge found a temporary home in three or four widely different places.
Anna's coming of age, and with it her command of the fortune left her by her father, had made no difference in her simple and inexpensive mode of life. She had had more than enough before for all her needs, and except that she now set aside a considerably larger sum for charitable purposes, the major portion of her income was never drawn upon, but allowed to accumulate untouched in her banker's coffers.
Anna and her brother had met but once since the latter's marriage, and then he brought with him the news of the birth of a daughter.
It was during the time of Anna's sojourn at Dieppe that Drelincourt, when on his way back from London, whither some law business had taken him, made a detour on purpose to see his sister and spend a week with her. He had exiled himself from England, preferring to live abroad, chiefly in Italy, the climate of which seemed to suit both him and his wife, but now and then wintering in Egypt or elsewhere.
But although he and Anna saw so little of each other, he wrote to her regularly once a month, and his letters, chatty, vivacious, and stuffed with news and gossip of one kind or another, made one of the chief pleasures of her quiet existence.
They were the sole link between her and that great, restless, seething world outside her about which she knew so little, and from any closer contact with which she was kept by her constitutional timidity and that distaste for mixing in general society which she found it quite impossible to overcome.