er, so I risked asking it on our way back to the house.

"Now that you are kind enough to tell me we have understood each other,
Miss Halcombe," I said, "now that you are sure of my gratitude for your
forbearance and my obedience to your wishes, may I venture to ask
who"--(I hesitated--I had forced myself to think of him, but it was
harder still to speak of him, as her promised husband)--"who the
gentleman engaged to Miss Fairlie is?"

Her mind was evidently occupied with the message she had received from
her sister. She answered in a hasty, absent way--

"A gentleman of large property in Hampshire."

Hampshire! Anne Catherick's native place. Again, and yet again, the
woman in white. There WAS a fatality in it.

"And his name?" I said, as quietly and indifferently as I could.

"Sir Percival Glyde."

SIR--Sir Percival! Anne Catherick's question--that suspicious question
about the men of the rank of Baronet whom I might happen to know--had
hardly been dismissed from my mind by Miss Halcombe's return to me in
the summer-house, before it was recalled again by her own answer. I
stopped suddenly, and looked at her.

"Sir Percival Glyde," she repeated, imagining that I had not heard her
former reply.

"Knight, or Baronet?" I asked, with an agitation that I could hide no
longer.

She paused for a moment, and then answered, rather coldly--

"Baronet, of course."

XI

Not a word more was said, on either side, as we walked back to the
house. Miss Halcombe hastened immediately to her sister's room, and I
withdrew to my studio to set in order all of Mr. Fairlie's drawings
that I had not yet mounted and restored before I resigned them to the
care of other hands. Thoughts that I had hitherto restrained, thoughts
that made my position harder than ever to endure, crowded on me now
that I was alone.

She was engaged to be married, and her future husband was Sir Percival
Glyde. A man of the rank of Baronet, and the owner of property in
Hampshire.

There were hundreds of baronets in England, and dozens of landowners in
Hampshire. Judging by the ordinary rules of evidence, I had not the
shadow of a reason, thus far, for connecting Sir Percival Glyde with
the suspicious words of inquiry that had been spoken to me by the woman
in white. And yet, I did connect him with them. Was it because he had
now become associated in my mind with Miss Fairlie, Miss Fairlie being,
in her turn, associated with Anne Catherick