The announcement of a lady who wished to see Mrs. Brookes caused the faithful old woman no particular emotion. She was well known and much respected among the neighbours of Poynings, in the humbler sense, and visits from several of their number were ordinary events enough in her life. The announcement found her, not in her own room, but in her mistress's, where she had replaced the portrait of George, and was sitting looking at it with dim eyes and clasped hands. The time had been long in rolling over her weary old head; for though she had passed the period of life in which feeling is very keen, and sorrow has power to torture, and constancy to last, Mrs. Brookes had no other objects to divide her thoughts with Mrs. Carruthers and her son; and day by day the old woman had brooded upon the new trouble which had come to those whom she loved so well. Perplexity mingled with her grief, for she knew not what to think. She had stoutly denied the possibility of George's guilt, in the memorable dialogue which had been the last she had held with his mother; but the faint and fluttering hope she entertained was very different from the confidence she expressed; and now, in the solitude and silence of the great house, in the absence of the absorbing demand which Mrs. Carruthers's condition had made upon all her attention and self-command, her stout old heart sank within her. His mother was gone away from all the scenes and associations which had come to have a terrible meaning. Would she ever return? Ellen hardly knew how she wished to answer this question. It were better and happier perhaps that she never did, that her tired heart should drowsily beat itself to rest in a strange country, and lie hidden under another soil than that her son had stained with blood. Had he done this thing? What of him? Where was he? The orderly house, the well-regulated household, needed little of the old housekeeper's supervision. The absence of the family made little difference. No cleaning-days interrupted the decorous order of things in an establishment in which it would have savoured of indecorum to suppose that the rule of absolute cleanliness was ever superseded. Alterations and repairs were innovating interruptions altogether incompatible with Poynings; and, in fact, there was little or nothing to break the dead level to which old Ellen had looked forward as that of her days when she should be left alone in the stately house, and which had begun to realize itself at once.  
Dixon had accompanied her mistress to foreign parts; and it was Martha, housemaid, who told Mrs. Brookes that a lady, who had been shown into her own room, wanted to see her.
 
"Which, I dare say, she's come after Susan's character," remarked Martha, parenthetically, "for she ain't this side Hamherst, I know."
 
Mrs. Brookes rose from the chair that she had placed opposite George's picture, took off her spectacles, from which she wiped a suspicious moisture, placed them carefully in her pocket, arranged her cap and shawl, and, without vouchsafing any answer to the speculations of Martha, she took her way slowly to the housekeeper's room. As she crossed the hall she saw a fly standing at the open door; and the driver, a man from Page's, touched his hat to her as she passed.
 
"I don't know this lady," she thought. "Nobody about here takes a fly to come to Poynings."
 
Her visitor was seated on the heavy horsehair sofa, which in the winter flanked the fire, but was now drawn close under the window through which George had entered on that memorable night, which came freshly into the memory of the old woman at that moment. As she looked sharply at the figure which rose to greet her, Mrs. Brookes felt in a moment that she was in the presence of a woman with some purpose.
 
The fixedness of Harriet Routh's face, the effort of a smile--for loneliness told upon her nerves now with rapidity and power--a something forced and painful in her voice, aroused an instinctive fear in Mrs. Brookes, and put her on her guard. She made a stiff bow and a movement with her body, which, when she was younger, would have been a curtsey, but was now only a duck, and asked her visitor's pleasure.
 
"I have called upon you, Mrs. Brookes," said Harriet, in a sweet and winning tone, "in consequence of a paragraph which I have seen in a newspaper."
 
It was an unfortunate beginning, for it set the old nurse instantly on her guard by arousing her suspicions, and making her resolve that the blue-eyed, sweet-spoken lady, who looked as if she had a purpose, should get nothing out of her.
 
"Indeed," she replied, very stiffly. "Please to sit down, ma'am."
 
Harriet resumed her seat, and began to speak rather quickly. Mrs. Brookes looked at her steadily, immovably, having put on her spectacles for the purpose, but gave her neither encouragement nor assistance by so much as a sound or a nod.
 
"I am Mrs. Routh," she said, "and a friend of Mr. George Dallas, Mrs. Carruthers's son. It is on his account and for his sake I have come here."
 
Mrs. Brookes's black-mittened hands pressed each other more closely as they lay clasped together in her lap, but she made no sign.
 
"I am aware of the unfortunate circumstances which keep Mr. Dallas and his mother apart," continued Harriet, who maintained a watch upon the old woman as steady as her own, but more covert; "and I am afraid he will be much distressed and alarmed if this reaches him without any preparation."
 
She held out a newspaper as she spoke--a newspaper she had procured at the inn at Amherst, and pointed to the paragraph which recorded the departure of Mr. and Mrs. Carruthers of Poynings and suite for the Continent; and, in addition, the regret with which "we" had learned that the departure in question had been occasioned by the dangerous illness of Mrs. Carruthers. Mrs. Brookes was immensely relieved, but not altogether reassured. She had a vague idea that the business of detection was sometimes intrusted to women, and she still had her doubts of the blue-eyed, sweet-spoken lady whose face indicated a purpose, without betraying it.
 
"Mr. Dallas knows of his mother's illness," said Mrs. Brookes. "He will not hear of it first from any newspaper."
 
"Indeed," said Harriet. "I am glad to know that. I am much relieved. Mr. Dallas is so intimate with Mr. Routh, my husband, and we are so much attached to him, that anything which is of importance to him concerns us. I am on my way to Dover, and I thought I would turn out of it a little to inquire into this matter."
 
"Thank you, ma'am," said Mrs. Brookes, still unsoftened. "May I ask if you have left your house in London?"
 
"We have for the present," replied Harriet; "indeed, I don't think we shall return there."
 
Mrs. Brookes looked confused and distressed.
 
"Excuse me," she said, after an awkward pause, "if I appear at all impertinent. I am George Dallas's old nurse, and more his mother's friend than her servant, and I can't be particular about other people when they are concerned. George Dallas is not as welcome here as he ought to be in his mother's house; you say you know that. If you really are Mrs. Routh, you ought to know more about him than that--more, in fact, than I do."
 
"Certainly," said Harriet, with unchanged sweetness of tone, and just the least gleam of colour in her cheek, showing that she was approaching her object. "I do know a great deal more about George Dallas than you do, if, as I conclude from your words, nothing has been heard of him since his last visit to his mother."
 
She paused very slightly, but Mrs. Brookes did not utter a word.
 
"You are quite right to be cautious, Mrs. Brookes; in such a delicate family matter as this, caution is most essential. Poor George has been so foolish, that he has laid himself open to being harmed either by enemies or injudicious friends; but I assure you, Mrs. Brookes, I am neither. I really am Mrs. Routh, and I am quite in George's confidence, and am here solely with the purpose of saving him any trouble or anxiety I can."
 
"Where is he?" asked the old woman, suddenly, as if the question were forced upon her.
 
"He is at Amsterdam, in Holland," replied Harriet, in a frank tone, and changing her seat for one beside Mrs. Brookes, as she spoke; "here are several letters from him. See," and she drew half a dozen sheets of foreign paper, closely written over, from her pocket, and put them into the old woman's hands. She beheld the letters with mingled pleasure and avoidance: they could not answer the question which tormented her, but they relieved her misgivings about her visitor. She felt assured now that she really was speaking to Mrs. Routh, and that the object of her visit was one of kindness to George. The letters were in his well-known hand; the thin paper and the postmarks satisfied her that they came from abroad. He was still out of the country, then; so far there was safety, but she must be cautious still concerning him. What if she could make Harriet the unconscious bearer of a further warning to him--a warning carefully contrived so that none but he should know its meaning, and he should understand it thoroughly? She would try. She had thought all this while she turned the letters over in her hands; then she returned them to Harriet, and said:
 
"Thank you, ma'am. I see these are from Master George, and it's plain he has great confidence in you. He never answered a letter I sent him: it went to your house."
 
"All communications for him are addressed to Mr. Routh," said Harriet, "and forwarded at once."
 
"Well, ma'am, he never told me where he had gone to, or wrote a letter but one to his mother; and when that came, she was too ill to read it, or know anything about it."
 
"Indeed," said Harriet, in a tone of commiseration; "she must have been taken ill just after he saw her, then?"
 
"She was," returned Mrs. Brookes, emphatically, "and you, ma'am, know, no doubt, why she saw him, and can understand that his conduct caused her illness."
 
"Not exactly that," said Harriet. "He told me all that had passed, and described his mother as full of forgiveness and hope, and he even said how well and handsome he thought her looking. George amuses us very much by constantly talking of his mother's beauty; he will be all the more distressed when he hears of her illness, now, and I really think, Mrs. Brookes, it cannot be quite fair to impute it to his conduct."
 
"It was just that, and nothing else," said the old woman; and her voice shook as she s............