Some weeks of quietness passed over us after these dreadful half-revelations which really disclosed nothing. I will not attempt to give you any explanation of my state of mind; I don’t think I could if I tried. I had ceased to think of insanity in respect to my sister Sarah; she was not insane--no such thing. That scrap of conversation I had overheard in her dressing-room overturned all my delusions. Some real thing, some real person, had power to drive her half mad with anxiety and fear. What she could be anxious about--what she could be afraid of--she who had lived in the deadest peace at home for nearly five-and-twenty years--was to me an inscrutable mystery. But that this Italian stranger was no stranger--that his name was given him after the name of my father--that love, supposed by Carson to be love in the heart, and admitted by Sarah to be love for the estate, had suggested that name--were facts not to be doubted. I need not say anything about the long trains of agitated and confused thinking into which these discoveries betrayed me. They ended in nothing--they could not end in anything. But for a kind of determination I had, to keep up stedfastly till some light came, and see the end of it, I don’t doubt they would have made me ill. But I kept well in spite of them. Either our bodies are not so sensitive as they are said to be, or I am a very stupid person, which I wouldn’t deny if I was taxed with it; for certainly many things that worry other people don’t trouble me very much. However, let the reason be what it might, I kept up. I could not take any comfort, as Sarah did, in knowing this young man had gone away. I can’t tell how she could have blinded herself, poor soul. _I_ knew he would come back. She did not seem to think so; yet surely she knew all about it far better than I did. What a strange blank, unexplainable mystery it was! Judging by appearances, the young man could not be much more than born when she returned home. Yet _she knew him_. Incomprehensible, wild, mad idea, of which, even after all I had heard, my reason denied the possibility! _She knew him!_ and what or who, except herself, could explain it?