“I must refer you to the spring of the present year, Miss Garth. Do you remember the fourth of March?”
Her attention wandered again; a thought seemed to have struck her at the moment when he spoke. Instead of answering his inquiry, she put a question of her own.
“Let me break the news to myself,” she said—“let me anticipate you, if I can. His useless will, the terms in which you speak of his daughters, the doubt you seem to feel of my continued respect for his memory, have opened a new view to me. Mr. Vanstone has died a ruined man—is that what you had to tell me?”
“Far from it. Mr. Vanstone has died, leaving a fortune of more than eighty thousand pounds—a fortune invested in excellent securities. He lived up to his income, but never beyond it; and all his debts added together would not reach two hundred pounds. If he had died a ruined man, I should have felt deeply for his children: but I should not have hesitated to tell you the truth, as I am hesitating now. Let me repeat a question which escaped you, I think, when I first put it. Carry your mind back to the spring of this year. Do you remember the fourth of March?”
Miss Garth shook her head. “My memory for dates is bad at the best of times,” she said. “I am too confused to exert it at a moment’s notice. Can you put your question in no other form?”
He put it in this form:
“Do you remember any domestic event in the spring of the present year which appeared to affect Mr. Vanstone more seriously than usual?”
Miss Garth leaned forward in her chair, and looked eagerly at Mr. Pendril across the table. “The journey to London!” she exclaimed. “I distrusted the journey to London from the first! Yes! I remember Mr. Vanstone receiving a letter—I remember his reading it, and looking so altered from himself that he startled us all.”
“Did you notice any apparent understanding between Mr. and Mrs. Vanstone on the subject of that letter?”
“Yes: I did. One of the girls—it was Magdalen—mentioned the post-mark; some place in America. It all comes back to me, Mr. Pendril. Mrs. Vanstone looked excited and anxious, the moment she heard the place named. They went to London together the next day; they explained nothing to their daughters, nothing to me. Mrs. Vanstone said the journey was for family affairs. I suspected something wrong; I couldn’t tell what. Mrs. Vanstone wrote to me from London, saying that her object was to consult a physician on the state of her health, and not to alarm her daughters by telling them. Something in the letter rather hurt me at the time. I thought there might be some other motive that she was keeping from me. Did I do her wrong?”