Chapter 11: Chapter 11

X It was on a Thursday in the week, and nearly at the end of the third month of my sojourn in Cumberland. In the morning, when I went down into the breakfast-room at the usual hour, Miss Halcombe, for the first time since I had known her, was absent from her customary place at the table. Miss Fairlie was out on the lawn. She bowed to me, but did not come in. Not a word had dropped from my lips, or from hers, that could unsettle either of us—and yet the same unacknowledged sense of emba…