Leaving Giovanna and Luigi to establish themselves in their new home and accustom themselves, so far as they may be able, to that changed condition of life to which the success of Captain Verinder\'s nefarious scheme has elevated them, we will hie back awhile to St. Oswyth\'s and ascertain how fortune has been dealing with our friends in that pleasant little town since we parted from them last.
When Mrs. Lisle, in one of her letters, informed her son that, owing to the loss of the greater part of their fortune the Miss Thursbys had been compelled to give up Vale View House and remove to an inexpensive cottage in the suburbs, she stated no more than the simple fact. Through the rascality of their agent, whose misdeeds had not been brought to light till he was beyond the reach of earthly reckoning, the sisters had lost the greater part of their property past all hope of recovery. All they had left was a somewhat fluctuating income, derivable from railway stock, which brought them in about two hundred a year. To this would be added the rental derivable from Vale View, which was their own property, as soon as a tenant should be found for it; for the present, however, it was standing empty. A matter of something over a hundred pounds had accrued to them from the sale of their surplus furniture and such other things as they no longer had a use for. More than all, they had felt the parting from Flossie, their gentle, steady-going old pony, but they had the consolation of knowing that in Mrs. Rudd it had found a mistress who would treat it with no less kindness than they had done.
It had been generally supposed among their friends and acquaintances, in view of their simple and unostentatious mode of life, that the sisters must have a few snug thousands--the result of their savings through a long course of years--put away somewhere: but such a supposition was wholly at variance with fact. In the belief that their income was as safe as the Bank of England, the sisters had never deemed it necessary to put by any portion of it, but had disbursed every shilling of whatever surplus was left in secret charity.
It was a matter of course that Tamsin should cling to them in their fallen fortunes, and accompany them to their new home. For the future she, and a young maid-servant, would be the only domestics whom they would be able to keep. But Tamsin, although heretofore her position had merely been that of maid to the sisters, had had the advantage of a sound bringing-up at home, and in days gone by had often lamented that sundry of her domestic acquirements had no scope for their exercise. Now, however, she would be able to prove both her skill as a cook and her deftness as parlourmaid, and all the housewifely gifts on which she secretly prided herself would have an opportunity of being brought into play. At length she felt that she was in her proper element.
As for the sisters, their sudden reverse of fortune was powerless to sour them or change them in any way. They remained just the same sweet and gracious ladies they had always been; and if such a thing were possible, they were beloved and respected more than ever by all who had the happiness of counting them among their friends. Their chief regret arose from the fact that they were no longer in a position to dispense their charities on the same scale as before.
The cottage to which they had removed--known as Rose Mount--made a pleasant little home, and its seven or eight rooms were amply sufficient for their changed needs. It stood on a sunny slope fronting the south, where flowers of a score different kinds--especially the one from which the cottage took its name--grew and blossomed to perfection. The thick hedge of evergreens which divided it from the highroad imparted to it that air of privacy and seclusion which the sisters loved.
With Ethel, meanwhile, affairs had by no means been at a standstill.
Day succeeded day till they had merged into weeks after Launce Keymer\'s sudden departure from St. Oswyth\'s, and still Ethel looked in vain for a letter or a message of some kind from him. She had no knowledge of his whereabouts, and however extreme her desire might be to communicate with him, she felt that only as a last resource could she prevail upon herself to ask for information from her lover\'s father. For one thing, she was by no means sure that Launce had broken the news of their engagement to Mr. Keymer senior. There had certainly been nothing in the note which the brewer wrote to Miss Thursby to indicate that such was the case. She was powerless to move.
Her aunts, even while in the midst of their own more personal anxieties, did not fail to sympathise with her over a state of affairs which was as much a puzzle to them as it was to her. Equally with Ethel, they felt that it was out of the question that they should ask the elder Mr. Keymer for an explanation of his son\'s silence, more especially now that their drop from affluence to comparative penury was a fact known to everybody. Could it be possible, they asked each other, that the fact in question had any bearing on Launce Keymer\'s mysterious silence? Had he merely engaged himself to Ethel in the expectation that, as her aunts\' heiress, he would secure a rich wife for himself? and now, when he found his expectations dashed to the ground, was he so incredibly base as to want to break faith with her? These were questions which, although the sisters could not help putting, they shrank from any endeavour to find an answer to them. It was a hard matter at all times for them to think ill of anyone, and they recoiled especially from doing so in the present case. Not for the world would they have whispered a word to Ethel which would have seemed to cast the faintest shadow of suspicion on her lover\'s truth and constancy.
As the reader will have already surmised, the news that the ladies of Vale View had undoubtedly lost the greater part of their money was not long in being conveyed to the elder Keymer by his cousin, Mr. Tuttle, clerk to Mr. Linaway the lawyer, the latter, as it may be remembered, having been employed by the sisters to draw up their wills and look after their business matters generally. To Mr. Linaway they had gone the day following the receipt of the letter which Launce Keymer had been allowed to read on that memorable evening when he was received at Vale View as Ethel\'s acknowledged lover.
Keymer senior had at once communicated with his son, and as they were both agreed that the affair, as between the latter and Ethel, must at once be nipped in the bud, it had been deemed advisable that Launce should stay where he was for the present. As far as was known, the sisters had not spoken of the engagement to anyone, and by-and-by he would be able to come back and brazen out the affair with impunity.
But there was one person who had by no means forgiven Launce Keymer\'s treachery towards her, and had made up her mind to be revenged upon him in one way or another. The person in question was Miss Hetty Blair, the pretty governess at Dulminster, whose workbox Keymer had rifled of the letters he himself had written her.
On discovering her loss Hetty had at once leaped to the very natural conclusion that her whilom lover had deserted her, and repossessed himself of his letters in consequence of his having forsaken her for someone else. The question that at once put itself to her was, as to the means by which it would be possible to find out who that someone was. Jealousy, and a determination to be revenged on her perfidious lover, worked very powerfully within her. She was by no means the kind of young woman to sit down helplessly under so foul a wrong and content herself with bemoaning her fate and shedding an infinitude of tears. She had really loved Keymer, and the blow he had aimed at her was such as she could neither forgive nor forget, and not till she should have succeeded in returning it with interest would she rest satisfied.
Her first step, despite her mother\'s protests, was to quit Dulminster and take lodgings in St. Oswyth\'s in a back street within a stone\'s throw of Keymer\'s home. She was not long ascertaining that Launce had left the town only a couple of days after his theft of the letters, but that no one, unless it were his father, knew either where he had gone, or the business which had taken him away. Neither did all Hetty\'s inquiries, perseveringly as she conducted them, tend to enlighten her on the one point about which she was more anxious than any other. If Launce were engaged to any young lady at St. Oswyth\'s, no one there seemed to know of it. That at various times he had flirted more or less desperately with half a score of damsels was not open to dispute; but there matters had ended, and not even the whisper of an engagement reached Hetty from anywhere.
In such a state of affairs it was only natural that she should ask herself whether Keymer, unknown to his friends and acquaintances, might not have left home on purpose to marry someone at a distance, and might not, at that very time, be on his bridal tour. It was a tormenting thought, and one of which Hetty could by no means disabuse her mind.
Anyone less persevering or less determined to leave no stone unturned in the task she had set herself would have gone back home disheartened, and have done her utmost to forget that anyone so unspeakably mean as Launce Keymer had proved himself to be should ever have beguiled her into loving him. But Miss Hetty was made of different stuff. She knew that Keymer could not stay away for ever. It might be months, perhaps even a year, before he returned. But that he would return she felt little doubt, and should he then bring with him a wife--well, in that case, let him look to himself! Meanwhile she would stay on where she was.
It was as well for the success of her purpose that she decided to do so. Among others whose acquaintance she had succeeded in making since her arrival at St. Oswyth\'s was the nursery governess at Mr. Keymer\'s (for the brewer\'s youngest child by his second marriage was as yet but seven years old), who, like herself, belonged ............