He had wavered for some weeks, not quite clear in his own mind what step he ought to take, hoping that some new piece of evidence, some detail in the story of Christian Harefield’s death, might place the whole business in a new light, and demonstrate Beatrix’s innocence. But Mr. Harefield had been dead a month, the first snowdrops were lifting their heads out of the dark borders, the robins were singing sweetly in the lengthening afternoons, and nothing had been discovered to improve Miss Harefield’s position in the eyes of Little Yafford. Nay rather, slander had grown and intensified with discussion, and people who had timorously hinted their doubts three weeks ago, now boldly declared their conviction of the young lady’s guilt. ‘How she can live in that big lonely house, with no one but her governess for company, is more than I can understand,’ said Miss Coyle; ‘she must be dreadfully hardened.’ ‘Something more will come out before long, you may depend upon it,’ said Mrs. Pomfret, the pew-opener, to her Sunday afternoon gossips over the black crockery teapot, with a sphinx squatting on the lid. This was the general opinion. Everybody was waiting for something to come out. The servants had doubtless been paid to hold their tongues--dark facts had been kept back by bribery. But the truth would come out sooner or later--even if Mr. Harefield’s ghost had to walk, like the elder Hamlet. ‘It may be a very long time, but it will all come out sooner or later,’ said Mr. Tudway, an old bachelor retired from the button trade, a great reader of magazines and annual registers, who knew all about Miss Blandy, and talked learnedly of Lucretia Borgia and Beatrice Cenci. ‘Look at Eliza Fenning.’ ‘Ah!’ sighed Miss Coyle. ‘Very true.’ She had the vaguest recollection of Eliza Fenning, as associated uncomfortably with beefsteak dumplings, and hanged in consequence of the association, but she was not going to exhibit her ignorance before Mr. Tudway, who was disagreeably self-satisfied on the strength of his stray paragraphs, and unconsidered scraps of information. Beatrix Harefield was slow to discover the current of public feeling. The shock of her father’s death left her for a little while apathetic to all smaller emotions, and when that apathy wore off she had a new and pressing grief in Cyril’s abandonment. Her new sense of liberty brought her no happiness--no desire to taste the sweets of freedom, or to exchange the gloom and solitude of the Water House for brighter scenes. If her independence did not bring Cyril to her side it brought nothing. Wealth, power, liberty, were valueless without him.