“There is nothing for you, dearest mother,” said he, in answer to her inquiring looks. “Who, then, is that for?” returned she, pointing to an unappropriated letter he had placed at his left hand. “Only a note for Forest, which I daresay will keep till we have left the table,” said he smiling; “although, if you had your way, I know she would be attended to before everybody. It has the Coveton post-mark, and doubtless comes from old Jacob.” “Who is ill,” said my Lady rising. “I do not see why Mary's correspondence should be delayed more than that of any one else. I have finished my breakfast, and will take it to her at once.” When she had left the room, Sir Richard remarked with asperity, that his mother's kindness really rendered her a slave to “that woman Forest.” “That is so,” assented Master Walter; “and I have of late observed that her spirits are always at the lowest when she has been having a confab with Mary. Is it possible, I wonder, that being balked of that fellow Derrick, Mistress Forest can have taken up with any new-fangled religious notions--I have heard of old maids doing such things--which are making her miserable, and my mother too?” “For shame, Walter!” cried Letty. “Do you suppose mamma is capable of any such folly?” “I don't believe for a moment that she is a victim to any delusion herself,” explained Walter; “but she sympathises with everybody she has a liking for, and the society of any such morbid person would be very bad for her. Between ourselves, I don't think that Madame de Castellan coming here has done her any good. That's a precious queer old woman, you may depend upon it. Not only did she decline to permit old Rachel and her husband to continue to sleep at Belcomb, which, considering its loneliness, one would have thought she would have been glad to do, instead of their occupying the lodge a quarter of a mile away; but it is said that she absolutely dismissed her French maid the day after her arrival, and therefore lives entirely alone!” “No wonder, then, she was so uncommonly anxious to get Mary,” observed the baronet; “and I am sure I wish she may, for my mother's sake. I have no doubt they are now both closeted together over that old dotard's letter from Coveton. As if there was not enough for my poor dear mother to do and think of just now, without bothering herself with her waiting-maid's father's rheumatism.” Sir Richard was right: my Lady and her confidential servant were at that very moment in the boudoir perusing with locked doors old Jacob's letter. From it Lady Lisgard gathered what had happened at Coveton as certainly as though the writer had been aware of it all, and written expressly to inform his daughter. “He has found it out,” said she with a ghastly look. “He had that fit, as your father calls it, at the moment when he learned for the first time that the girl who came ashore alive and myself are one and the same. Poor Ralph, poor Ralph!”