Miss Timmens felt, as she would have said, struck into herself. An idea flashed over her that the words had not a syllable of truth in them. "What did she go to London for?" Mrs. James glanced over her two shoulders, seemingly in terror herself, and sunk her voice to a whisper. "She had grown afraid of the place, this dark winter weather. Miss Timmens--it's as true as you're there--nothing would persuade her out of the fancy that she was always seeing David Garth. He used to stand in a sheet at the end of the upstairs passage and look at her. Leastways, _she_ said so." This nearly did for Miss Timmens. It might be true; and she could not confute it. "Do _you_ see him, Mrs. James?" "Well, no; I never have. Goodness knows, I don't want to." "But Harriet was not well enough to take a long journey," contended Miss Timmens. "She never could have undertaken one in her state of health." "I don't know what you mean by 'state,' Miss Timmens. She would shake a bit at times; but we saw nothing else the matter with her. Perhaps _you_ would shake if you had an apparition in the house. Any way, well or ill, she went off to London. Louis took her as far as the station and saw her away." "Will you give me her address? I should like to write to her." Mrs. James said she could not give the address, because she did not know it. Nothing more was to be got out of her, and Miss Timmens reluctantly departed. "I should hope they've not murdered her--and are concealing her in the house as Hill concealed David," was the comment she gave vent to in her perplexity and wrath. From that time, nothing could be heard of Harriet Roe. A week went on; nearly two weeks; but she never was seen, and no tidings came of her. So far as could be ascertained, she had not gone away by train: neither station-master nor porter remembered to have seen her. Miss Timmens grew as thin as a ghost herself: the subject worried her night and day. That some ill had happened to Harriet; or been _done_ to her, she did not doubt. Once or twice she managed to see Roe; once or twice she saw Mrs. James: speaking to them at the door with the chain up. Roe said he heard from his wife nearly every other day; but he would not show the letters, or give the address: a conclusive proof to the mind of Miss Timmens that neither had any existence. _What had they done with Harriet?_ Miss Timmens could not have been in much worse mental trouble had she herself made away with her. One morning the postman delivered a letter at the school-house. It bore the London post-mark, and purported to be from Harriet. A few lines only--saying she was well and enjoying herself, and should come back sometime--the writing shaky and blotted, and bearing but a slight resemblance to hers. Miss Timmens dashed it on the table. "The fools, to think they can deceive me this way! That's no more Harriet's writing than it is mine."