In that case," I said, "excuse me if I tell you, in our legal phrase,
that you are travelling out of the record. Whatever the consequences
may be, Sir Percival has a right to expect that your sister should
carefully consider her engagement from every reasonable point of view
before she claims her release from it. If that unlucky letter has
prejudiced her against him, go at once, and tell her that he has
cleared himself in your eyes and in mine. What objection can she urge
against him after that? What excuse can she possibly have for changing
her mind about a man whom she had virtually accepted for her husband
more than two years ago?"

"In the eyes of law and reason, Mr. Gilmore, no excuse, I daresay. If
she still hesitates, and if I still hesitate, you must attribute our
strange conduct, if you like, to caprice in both cases, and we must
bear the imputation as well as we can."

With those words she suddenly rose and left me. When a sensible woman
has a serious question put to her, and evades it by a flippant answer,
it is a sure sign, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, that she has
something to conceal. I returned to the perusal of the newspaper,
strongly suspecting that Miss Halcombe and Miss Fairlie had a secret
between them which they were keeping from Sir Percival, and keeping
from me. I thought this hard on both of us, especially on Sir Percival.

My doubts--or to speak more correctly, my convictions--were confirmed
by Miss Halcombe's language and manner when I saw her again later in
the day. She was suspiciously brief and reserved in telling me the
result of her interview with her sister. Miss Fairlie, it appeared,
had listened quietly while the affair of the letter was placed before
her in the right point of view, but when Miss Halcombe next proceeded
to say that the object of Sir Percival's visit at Limmeridge was to
prevail on her to let a day be fixed for the marriage she checked all
further reference to the subject by begging for time. If Sir Percival
would consent to spare her for the present, she would undertake to give
him his final answer before the end of the year. She pleaded for this
delay with such anxiety and agitation, that Miss Halcombe had promised
to use her influence, if necessary, to obtain it, and there, at Miss
Fairlie's earnest entreaty, all further discussion of the marriage
question had ended.

The purely temporary arrangement thus proposed might have been
convenient enoug