She charged it all presently with the certainty of intuition upon her aunt. For in her Rotha had not one particle of trust. She had received at her hands no unkind treatment, (what was the matter with the mantua- makers, though?) she had heard from her lips no unkind word; yet both would not have put such a distance between them as this want of trust did. It was Rotha's nature to despise where she could not trust; and here unhappily there was also the complication of fear. Somehow, she was sure, her aunt had done it; she had prevented Mr. Digby from seeing her; and now he was away, and how could she tell but cunning arrangements would be potent enough to keep him from seeing her evermore? Any reason for such machinations Rotha indeed failed to divine; why her aunt should desire to keep them apart, was a mere mystery; all the same, she had done it; and the chances were she would choose to do it permanently. Mr. Digby had been duped, or baffled somehow; else he would never have left the country without seeing his charge. She did not know before that Mr. Digby could be duped, or baffled; but if once or twice, why not again. She would write to him. Ah, she had not his address, that he was to have given her. _He_ would write. Yes, but somebody else would get the letters. Rotha was of anything but a suspicious disposition, yet now suspicion after suspicion came in her mind. The possible moving cause for her aunt's action was entirely beyond her imagination; the action itself and the drift of it she discerned clearly. There rose in her a furious opposition and dislike towards her aunt, a storm of angry abhorrence. And yet, she was in Mrs. Busby's care, under her protection, and also--in her power. Rotha gnashed her teeth, mentally, as she reviewed the situation. But by degrees grief overweighed even anger and fear; grief so cutting, so desolating, so crushing, as the girl had hardly known in her life before; an agony of anguish which held her awake till late in the night; till feeling and sense were blunted with exhaustion, and in her misery she slept. When the day came, Rotha awaked to a cold, dead sense of the state of things; the ashes of the fire that had burned so fiercely the night before; desolate and dreary as the ashes of a fire always are. She revolved while she was dressing her plan of action. She must have certain information from Mrs. Busby herself. She was certain indeed of what she had heard; but she must hear it from somebody besides Lesbia, and she must not betray Lesbia. She thought it all over, and went down stairs trembling in the excitement and the pain of what she had to do.