On our way to the farm we arranged that Miss Halcombe was to enter the
house alone, and that I was to wait outside, within call. We adopted
this mode of proceeding from an apprehension that my presence, after
what had happened in the churchyard the evening before, might have the
effect of renewing Anne Catherick's nervous dread, and of rendering her
additionally distrustful of the advances of a lady who was a stranger
to her. Miss Halcombe left me, with the intention of speaking, in the
first instance, to the farmer's wife (of whose friendly readiness to
help her in any way she was well assured), while I waited for her in
the near neighbourhood of the house.

I had fully expected to be left alone for some time. To my surprise,
however, little more than five minutes had elapsed before Miss Halcombe
returned.

"Does Anne Catherick refuse to see you?" I asked in astonishment.

"Anne Catherick is gone," replied Miss Halcombe.

"Gone?"

"Gone with Mrs. Clements. They both left the farm at eight o'clock
this morning."

I could say nothing--I could only feel that our last chance of
discovery had gone with them.

"All that Mrs. Todd knows about her guests, I know," Miss Halcombe went
on, "and it leaves me, as it leaves her, in the dark. They both came
back safe last night, after they left you, and they passed the first
part of the evening with Mr. Todd's family as usual. Just before
supper-time, however, Anne Catherick startled them all by being
suddenly seized with faintness. She had had a similar attack, of a
less alarming kind, on the day she arrived at the farm; and Mrs. Todd
had connected it, on that occasion, with something she was reading at
the time in our local newspaper, which lay on the farm table, and which
she had taken up only a minute or two before."

"Does Mrs. Todd know what particular passage in the newspaper affected
her in that way?" I inquired.

"No," replied Miss Halcombe. "She had looked it over, and had seen
nothing in it to agitate any one. I asked leave, however, to look it
over in my turn, and at the very first page I opened I found that the
editor had enriched his small stock of news by drawing upon our family
affairs, and had published my sister's marriage engagement, among his
other announcements, copied from the London papers, of Marriages in
High Life. I concluded at once that this was the paragraph which had
so strangely affected Anne Catherick, and I thought I saw in it, a