‘If you have to go, I shall see that you do not go alone,’ was all Sara could answer. She could eat no more. She rose from her chair. Leaving Avice with the letter, to follow her own devices, she retired to her atelier, and there tried to reason it all out, and comprehend it—and failed. It grew more inexplicable, and more horrible, the more thought she gave to it, until at last an idea flashed into her mind, which left her cold and trembling and miserable, with a misery such as she had never known before. Had any change come over him?—did he love her less? She laughed at it, put it aside, argued it away, and at last did attain to a pretty certain conviction that she was wrong; but the misery remained. It was there, like a dead, leaden weight at her heart. She might argue away her first impression—the first subtle intrusion of the idea, or the shadow or the ghost of the idea, false, but she could not get rid of the wretchedness caused by the fact that the idea had intruded—that something had happened so strange as to open the door for it to enter by. She tried to paint, but could not. She passed a morning of misery—heavy, unrelieved, and indescribable. When she returned to Avice, she found her too dejected, puzzled, unhappy. ‘I don’t want to go,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what Jerome means, or wants. If I go to England, he ought to come and fetch me.’ He had said no word of coming, as Sara remembered, with a heartache. ‘He wrote in haste, and promised to let us hear again,’ she replied. ‘There is sure to be a letter to-morrow explaining.’ ‘I don’t see how it is to be explained,’ said Avice, despondently. ‘But if Jerome thinks he can tyrannise over me, he is mistaken.’ Her lips closed one upon the other with an expression of obstinacy. ‘Hush! as if he had any thought of such a thing!’ said Sara, coldly; but this exchange of ideas had not resulted in lightening the heart of either one or the other of them. [Illustration] CHAPTER VII. ‘AN ENEMY HATH DONE THIS.’ THE postman did not call at all the following morning, and Sara, she scarcely knew why, felt sick at heart. What a martyrdom those four or five postal deliveries per diem of a great town may and do inflict upon some of those who are eagerly waiting for _something_ to come, and it never appears. The postman goes past, or calls, with terrible regularity. Scarcely has one bitter disappointment been tided over, than one sees him again, with the bundle of letters in his left hand, passing along the street, or running up the steps. There is the sharp fall of a letter in the box, the sickening interval before the servant comes in with the salver, and on it a circular, an invitation, a bill—never the thing one is longing for so desperately. Under the circumstances, give us rather by all means the one delivery during the day of the dark and barbarous village which is five miles from everywhere. There one is at least secure of an interval of twenty-four hours between each ordeal.