As soon as Mrs. Langford had been informed by her son, at his mistress's desire, of the unanswerable proof of his innocence, she hastened to the Hall, and requesting a private interview with Mrs. Hamilton, placed at once in her hands all the trinkets and watch, with which she had been at different times intrusted; related all that had passed between her and Miss Fortescue, the excessive misery she seemed to be enduring; and confessed that the few pounds she had given her, as the sums obtained by the sale of the trinkets, she had advanced herself, having resolved that nothing should induce her to dispose of them; and that of course it was the difficulty she had in advancing their right value, which had occasioned the length of time that had elapsed since Ellen had first sought her. "Would it not go far to prove she really did wish to return the money?" Mrs. Hamilton thought, long after the widow had left her, and the sums she had advanced returned with interest. "Was it to return the fatally appropriated sum, or because she needed more? Ellen had so positively, and with such agony asserted the first, that it was scarcely possible to disbelieve her; but what was this fearful difficulty, this pressing demand by one so young for so much money? Why, if it were comparatively innocent, would she not speak?" The more she thought, the more perplexed and anxious she seemed to become. The act itself of endeavoring to dispose of the trinkets, especially those that had been given and received, as doubly valuable because they had been worn by her mother, would have been sufficiently faulty to have occasioned natural displeasure, but compared with other known and unknown faults, it sunk into almost nothing. Mrs. Hamilton collected them all together, those Mrs. Langford had returned, and the few remaining in her niece's drawer, and carefully put them away, till circumstances might authorize her returning them to Ellen, and determined on saying nothing more on the subject either to Ellen or her own family. One thing Ellis reported to her regarding Ellen, which certainly seemed like a consciousness of the wrong she had done Robert, and a wish to atone for it. She begged Ellis so earnestly that she might see him, if it were only for five minutes, that she could not resist her; and when he came, she implored him so touchingly, so pleadingly to forgive her long silence himself, and entreat his mother to do so too; assuring him, that it was the hope of being able to restore the notes to him, without revealing her identity, which had caused the silence, that it was scarcely possible to listen to her unmoved. It was no false humility, but the deepest, most unfeigned contrition for having been the cause of injury.