Pamela finished dressing the children, and led little David downstairs. She told Maggie to take them in the garden and let them play in the shade; she would come out later and join them. Then she turned back, white and trembling, an ugly doubt haunting her mind, and searched for the note that had been left for her. Would the note, she wondered, explain this horrible mystery, or merely increase her doubt? It was lying where the boy had left it on the hall table, and it was addressed, she saw, in Blanche's handwriting. She opened it and read it where she stood. The writer had omitted the formality of the customary mode of address, she had also omitted to sign her name at the end. "When you read this," she had written, "you will probably have heard of my departure, and you will feel less surprise at the abrupt manner of my leaving when I say that I was an unwilling listener to what passed between you and Mr Arnott after I left the drawing-room last night. For the sake of my reputation I could not remain beneath your roof an hour longer than was necessary. I made my preparations last night and left early this morning. I warn you, by the knowledge I possess, to be careful how you discuss me and my actions. If my reputation suffers I shall know where to attach the blame." Pamela folded the note carefully, and carried it with her into the sitting-room, and sat down to think. This girl held the dangerous knowledge of her false position as Arnott's wife. She meant to make use of the knowledge if at any time it suited her to use it. The thought was bitterly humiliating. For the time it swamped every other consideration, even the doubt which had haunted her before reading the note was lost sight of in the shock of this discovery. She tried to recall what had been said on the previous evening that had revealed their secret to this girl, who from her own admission had been eavesdropping. But of that interview no clear recollection remained. She could not recall the scraps of actual talk; only the bitterness of that monstrous duologue lingered in her memory, and the insults Herbert had flung at her in his anger, and her own threat to leave him. Reviewing the scene now, the sordidness of it gripped her, disgusted her. And to think that a third person should have deliberately listened to that painful, miserable interview. The thought of Blanche's duplicity enraged her; the veiled threat conveyed in the note angered her more than it alarmed her. How dared she threaten her with the disclosure of her infamously acquired knowledge? She read the note carefully a second time. There was no suggestion in it that the writer's flight were in any sense connected with Arnott's sudden departure. And yet that veiled threat at the end...