look was like suppressed anger, sometimes like suppressed dread,
sometimes like neither--like nothing, in short, which I could
understand. A week elapsed, leaving us all three still in this
position of secret constraint towards one another. My situation,
aggravated by the sense of my own miserable weakness and
forgetfulness of myself, now too late awakened in me, was becoming
intolerable. I felt that I must cast off the oppression under
which I was living, at once and for ever--yet how to act for the
best, or what to say first, was more than I could tell.

From this position of helplessness and humiliation I was rescued
by Miss Halcombe. Her lips told me the bitter, the necessary, the
unexpected truth; her hearty kindness sustained me under the shock
of hearing it; her sense and courage turned to its right use an
event which threatened the worst that could happen, to me and to
others, in Limmeridge House.



X


It was on a Thursday in the week, and nearly at the end of the
third month of my sojourn in Cumberland.

In the morning, when I went down into the breakfast-room at the
usual hour, Miss Halcombe, for the first time since I had known
her, was absent from her customary place at the table.

Miss Fairlie was out on the lawn. She bowed to me, but did not