She was as conscious that I observed this strange change upon her as I was myself; and she faced me with such a resolution and defiance! No! I could read it in her eyes, and the full look she turned upon me whenever I looked at her--she would die rather than I should find it out. It is quite impossible, however ignorant you may be of the causes of it, to live in the close presence of a person devoured by anxiety without being infected by it, more or less. One gets curious and excited, you know, in spite of one’s self; and all the more, of course, if the cause is quite inexplicable and the trouble sudden. I lived in the kind of feeling that you have just immediately before a thunderstorm--the air all of a hush, so that you could hear the faintest stir of a bird, or rustle of a branch, yet never knowing the moment when, instead of the bird’s motion or the leaves’ tremble, it might be the thunder itself that clamoured in your ears. In this condition of mind Sara’s little side reference to Carson, and my sister’s acquaintance with everything that passed, did not fail to have its effect upon me, as well as other things. I don’t know that I would have been above questioning Carson if I could have got at her; but I did not see her once in three months, and could not have had any conversation with her without making quite an affair of it, and letting all the house know. Carson was not her right name. She had been Sarah’s maid when she was a young girl, and had married and lost her husband, and come back to the Park just in time to go abroad with her mistress, and being well known in the house by her maiden name, never got any other. I could not help wondering within myself if she knew, or how much she knew, of Sarah’s trouble, and its cause, whatever that might be. When the thought rose in my mind whether I might not try to get to private speech of Carson, I was out in the grounds making a little survey, to see how everything was looking for spring, and had just been at the lodge to see poor little Mary, who (as I had foreseen from the beginning) was bad with the whooping-cough, but no worse than was to be expected, and nothing alarming or out of the way. The carriage had just gone up to take Sarah out for her drive, and I, all in shelter of a clump of holly bushes, became the witness, quite unawares and without any intention, of a most singular scene. A footstep went softly by me upon the gravel. I was just behind the lodge, and within sight of the gate and the road without. I saw Carson, in her cap and in-doors dress, go softly out at the gate. She went out into the road, pretending to hold out her hand and raise her face to see whether it rained; as if it were not perfectly clear to any one that it did not rain, nor would, either, till the glass fell. She looked up and down with an anxious look, and lingered five minutes or more in that same position. Then she came in, and met the carriage just inside the gate, which Williams had