After a little, the good news came to Mirk from France, that my Lady, trusting to what she had heard from her old friend, was coming home again. The only stipulation she made was, that her withdrawal from the Abbey was not to be alluded to by any of her family, for which, indeed, added she, there would be the less necessity, since the principal cause of it--the ill-feeling between her sons--no longer, as she was delighted to understand, existed. Of course, Lady Lisgard could not prevent “the county” from canvassing the matter, any more than she could have forbidden a general election; and, in truth, her affairs were almost as much talked about as politics after a dissolution of parliament. She and her sons had each their partisans, who argued for their respective clients often with great enthusiasm, and sometimes with an ingenuity worthy of better premises. But it was the general opinion that Master Walter's marriage was at the bottom of the whole business, and that that designing woman, Rose Aynton, had sown dissension in what had once been one of the best-conducted and most united families in Wheatshire. An account of the inquest in the local journals, a paragraph in the _Times_, headed “Curious Catastrophe,” and an allusion to Don Quixote's adventure _apropos_ of the homicidal wind-mill, in a comic print, exhausted the subject of Ralph Derrick's death. But my Lady returned to Mirk Abbey in deep mourning, it was understood in consequence of the sudden death of Madame de Castellan, which occurred, singularly enough, almost immediately after her leaving Belcomb. It was thought very unfortunate that the two old friends should thus have never been permitted to meet. Madame's demise, however, of course left Mary Forest free to rejoin her former mistress, in whose company, indeed, she returned to Mirk. We have said that besides the two persons in possession of my Lady's secret, there was a third who had his shrewd suspicions. But if Arthur Haldane's legal training had really enabled him to come to the right conclusion in the matter, it also judiciously restrained him from saying anything about it.