shed with troubles.

It was already Friday. Where and how could a message reach him? She
dreaded him, it is true: but why she dreaded him she knew not. It was a
sort of vague terror, such as some persons feel at the sound of the
sea, or the deep-voiced moaning of the wind through trees. It conveyed
a sense of peril through a sense of sadness--no more. She had grown to
dislike him from the impertinent rebuke Miss Calvert had administered to
her on his account. The mention of Calvert was coupled with a darkened
room, leeches, and ice on the head, and worse than all, a torturing
dread that her mind might wander, and the whole secret history of the
correspondence leak out in her ramblings.

Were not these reasons enough to make her tremble at the return of the
man who had occasioned so much misery? Yet, if she could even find a
pretext, could she be sure that she could summon courage to say, "I'll
not see you?" There are men to whom a cruelly cold reply is a repulse;
but Calvert was not one of these, and this she knew well. Besides, were
she to decline to receive him, might it not drive him to come and ask to
see the girls, who now, by acceding to his request, need never hear or
know of his visit?

After long and mature deliberation, she determined on her line of
action. She would pretend to the girls that her letter was from her
lawyer, who, accidentally finding himself in her neighbourhood, begged
an interview as he passed through Orta on his way to Milan, and for this
purpose she could go over in the boat alone, and meet Calvert on his
arrival. In this way she could see him without the risk of her nieces'
knowledge, and avoid the unpleasantness of not asking him to remain when
he had once passed her threshold.

"I can at least show him," she thought, "that our old relations are
not to be revived, though I do not altogether break off all
acquaintanceship. No man has a finer sense of tact,-and he will
understand the distinction I intend, and respect it" She also bethought
her it smacked somewhat of a vengeance--though she knew not precisely
how or why--that she'd take Sophia Calvert's note along with her, and
show him how her inquiry for him was treated by his family. She had a
copy of her own, a most polite and respectful epistle it was, and in no
way calculated to evoke the rebuke it met with. "He'll be perhaps able
to explain the mystery," thought she, "and whatever Miss Calvert's
misconception, he can eradicate it