Her aunts, even while in the midst of their own more personal anxieties, did not fail to sympathise with her over a state of affairs which was as much a puzzle to them as it was to her. Equally with Ethel, they felt that it was out of the question that they should ask the elder Mr. Keymer for an explanation of his son’s silence, more especially now that their drop from affluence to comparative penury was a fact known to everybody. Could it be possible, they asked each other, that the fact in question had any bearing on Launce Keymer’s mysterious silence? Had he merely engaged himself to Ethel in the expectation that, as her aunts’ heiress, he would secure a rich wife for himself? and now, when he found his expectations dashed to the ground, was he so incredibly base as to want to break faith with her? These were questions which, although the sisters could not help putting, they shrank from any endeavour to find an answer to them. It was a hard matter at all times for them to think ill of anyone, and they recoiled especially from doing so in the present case. Not for the world would they have whispered a word to Ethel which would have seemed to cast the faintest shadow of suspicion on her lover’s truth and constancy. As the reader will have already surmised, the news that the ladies of Vale View had undoubtedly lost the greater part of their money was not long in being conveyed to the elder Keymer by his cousin, Mr. Tuttle, clerk to Mr. Linaway the lawyer, the latter, as it may be remembered, having been employed by the sisters to draw up their wills and look after their business matters generally. To Mr. Linaway they had gone the day following the receipt of the letter which Launce Keymer had been allowed to read on that memorable evening when he was received at Vale View as Ethel’s acknowledged lover. Keymer senior had at once communicated with his son, and as they were both agreed that the affair, as between the latter and Ethel, must at once be nipped in the bud, it had been deemed advisable that Launce should stay where he was for the present. As far as was known, the sisters had not spoken of the engagement to anyone, and by-and-by he would be able to come back and brazen out the affair with impunity. But there was one person who had by no means forgiven Launce Keymer’s treachery towards her, and had made up her mind to be revenged upon him in one way or another. The person in question was Miss Hetty Blair, the pretty governess at Dulminster, whose workbox Keymer had rifled of the letters he himself had written her.