I need not follow the steps by which the inquiry-office became able
so far to enlighten the mother of Emmeline concerning the person and
habits of the visitor to the deserted shaft, that she had now come
to Glaston in pursuit of yet farther discovery concerning him. She
had no plan in her mind, and as yet merely intended going to church
and everywhere else where people congregated, in the hope of
something turning up to direct inquiry. Not a suspicion of Leopold
had ever crossed her. She did not even know that he had a sister in
Glaston, for Emmeline's friends had not all been intimate with her
parents.

On the morning after her arrival, she went out early to take a walk,
and brood over her cherished vengeance; and finding her way into the
park, wandered about in it for some time. Leaving it at length by
another gate, and inquiring the way to Glaston, she was directed to
a footpath which would lead her thither across the fields. Following
this, she came to a stile, and being rather weary with her long
walk, sat down on it.

The day was a grand autumnal one. But nature had no charms for her.
Indeed had she not been close shut in the gloomy chamber of her own
thoughts, she would not thus have walked abroad alone; for nature
was to her a dull, featureless void; while her past was scarcely of
the sort to invite retrospection, and her future was clouded.

It so fell that just then Leopold was asleep in his chair,--every
morning he slept a little soon after being carried out,--and that