hat
was taking possession of her on being left alone for the first time since
that great crisis in her life. And Mrs. Crewe, too, was not at home!

Janet, with a sense of discouragement for which she rebuked herself as
childish, walked sadly home again; and when she entered the vacant
dining-room, she could not help bursting into tears. It is such vague
undefinable states of susceptibility as this--states of excitement or
depression, half mental, half physical--that determine many a tragedy in
women's lives. Janet could scarcely eat anything at her solitary dinner:
she tried to fix her attention on a book in vain; she walked about the
garden, and felt the very sunshine melancholy.

Between four and five o'clock, old Mr. Pittman called, and joined her in
the garden, where she had been sitting for some time under one of the
great apple-trees, thinking how Robert, in his best moods, used to take
little Mamsey to look at the cucumbers, or to see the Alderney cow with
its calf in the paddock. The tears and sobs had come again at these
thoughts; and when Mr. Pittman approached her, she was feeling languid
and exhausted. But the old gentleman's sight and sensibility were obtuse,
and, to Janet's satisfaction, he showed no consciousness that she was in
grief.

'I have a task to impose upon you, Mrs. Dempster,' he said, with a
certain toothless pomposity habitual to him: 'I want you to look over
those letters again in Dempster's bureau, and see if you can find one
from Poole about the mortgage on those houses at Dingley. It will be
worth twenty pounds, if you can find it; and I don't know where it can
be, if it isn't among those letters in the bureau. I've looked everywhere
at the office for it. I'm going home now, but I'll call again tomorrow,
if you'll be good enough to look in the meantime.'

Janet said she would look directly, and turned with Mr. Pittman into the
house. But the search would take her some time, so he bade her good-bye,
and she went at once to a bureau which stood in a small back-room, where
Dempster used sometimes to write letters and receive people who came on
business out of office hours. She had looked through the contents of the
bureau more than once; but today, on removing the last bundle of letters
from one of the compartments, she saw what she had never seen before, a
small nick in the wood, made in the shape of a thumb-nail, evidently
intended as a means of pushing aside the movable back of the comp