nkworth, must be said at
some fitter time. I beg you will leave me."

"Leave you!"

"Yes. Leave me to the solitude that is best for me, and to the sorrow
that I have deserved. Thank you--and good-by."

Arnold made no attempt to disguise his disappointment and surprise.

"If I must go, I must," he said, "But why are you in such a hurry?"

"I don't want you to call me your wife again before the people of this
inn."

"Is _that_ all? What on earth are you afraid of?"

She was unable fully to realize her own apprehensions. She was doubly
unable to express them in words. In her anxiety to produce some reason
which might prevail on him to go, she drifted back into that very
conversation about Blanche into which she had declined to enter but the
moment before.

"I have reasons for being afraid," she said. "One that I can't give; and
one that I can. Suppose Blanche heard of what you have done? The longer
you stay here--the more people you see--the more chance there is that
she _might_ hear of it."

"And what if she did?" asked Arnold, in his own straightforward way. "Do
you think she would be angry with me for making myself useful to _you?_"

"Yes," rejoined Anne, sharply, "if she was jealous of me."

Arnold's unlimited belief in Blanche expressed itself, without the
slightest compromise, in two words:

"That's impossible!"

Anxious as she was, miserable as she was, a faint smile flitted over
Anne's face.

"Sir Patrick would tell you, Mr. Brinkworth, that nothing is impossible
where women are concerned." She dropped her momentary lightness of tone,
and went on as earnestly as ever. "You can't put yourself in Blanche's
place--I can. Once more, I beg you to go. I don't like your coming here,
in this way! I don't like it at all!"

She held out her hand to take leave. At the same moment there was a loud
knock at the door of the room.

Anne sank into the chair at her side, and uttered a faint cry of alarm.
Arnold, perfectly impenetrable to all sense of his position, asked what
there was to frighten her--and answered the knock in the two customary
words:

"Come in!"

CHAPTER THE TENTH.

MR. BISHOPRIGGS.

THE knock at the door was repeated--a louder knock than before.

"Are you deaf?" shouted Arnold.

The door opened, little by little, an inch at a time. Mr. Bishopriggs
appeared mysteriously, with the cloth for dinner over his arm, and with
his second in command behind him, bearing "the furnishing of the