railway. I made a sign to the driver to stop.
As he obeyed me, a respectable-looking man put
his head out of the window to see what was the
matter.

"I beg your pardon," I said; " but am I
right in supposing that you are going to
Blackwater Park?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"With a letter for any one?"

"With a letter for Miss Halcombe, ma'am."

"You may give me the letter. I am Miss
Halcombe."

The man touched his hat, got out of the fly
immediately, and gave me the letter.

I opened it at once; and read these lines. I
copy them here (without the address to me, or
the writer's signature); thinking it best to
destroy the original for caution's sake.

"DEAR MADAM. Your letter, received this
morning, has caused me very great anxiety. I
will reply to it as briefly and plainly as possible.

"My careful consideration of the statement
made by yourself, and my knowledge of Lady
Glyde's position, as defined in the settlement,
lead me, I regret to say, to the conclusion that
a loan of the trust money to Sir Percival (or, in
other words, a loan of some portion of the
twenty thousand pounds of Lady Glyde's
fortune), is in contemplation, and that she is made
a party to the deed, in order to secure her
approval of a flagrant breach of trust, and to have
her signature produced against her, if she should
complain hereafter. It is impossible, on any
other supposition, to account, situated as she is,
for her execution to a deed of any kind being
wanted at all.

"In the event of Lady Glyde's signing such
a document as I am compelled to suppose the
deed in question to be, her trustees would be at
liberty to advance money to Sir Percival out of
her twenty thousand pounds. If the amount so
lent should not be paid back, and if Lady Glyde
should have children, their fortune would then
be diminished by the sum, large or small, so
advanced. In plainer terms still, the transaction,
for anything Lady Glyde knows to the contrary,
may be a fraud upon her unborn children.

"Under these serious circumstances, I would
recommend Lady Glyde to assign as a reason for withholding her signature, that she wishes the
deed to be first submitted to myself, as her
family solicitor (in the absence of my partner,
Mr. Gilmore). No reasonable objection can be
made to taking this course—for, if the
transaction is an honourable one, there will
necessarily be no difficulty in my giving my
approval.

"Sincerely assuring you of my readiness to
afford any additional help or advice that may be
wanted, I beg to remain, Madam, your faithful
servant,
                                             "______________"

I read this kind and sensible letter very
thankfully. It supplied Laura with a reason
for objecting to the signature which was
unanswerable, and which we could both of us
understand. The messenger waited near me while I
was reading, to receive his directions when I
had done.

"Will you be good enough to say that I
understand the letter, and that I am very much
obliged?" I said. "There is no other reply
necessary at present."

Exactly at the moment when I was speaking
those words, holding the letter open in my hand,
Count Fosco turned the corner of the lane from
the high road, and stood before me as if he had
sprung up out of the earth.

The suddenness of his appearance, in the very
last place under heaven in which I should have
expected to see him, took me completely by
surprise. The messenger wished me good
morning, and got into the fly again. I could
not say a word to him—I was not even able to
return his bow. The conviction that I was
discovered—and by that man, of all others—
absolutely petrified me.

"Are you going back to the house, Miss
Halcombe?" he inquired, without showing the
least surprise on his side, and without even
looking after the fly, which drove off while he
was speaking to me.

I collected myself sufficiently to make a sign
in the affirmative.

"I am going back, too," he said. "Pray
allow me the pleasure of accompanying you.
Will you take my arm? You look surprised at
seeing me!"

I took his arm. The first of my scattered
senses that came back, was the sense that warned
me to sacrifice anything rather than make an
enemy of him.

"You look surprised at seeing me!" he
repeated, in his quietly pertinacious way.

"I thought, Count, I heard you with your
birds in the breakfast-room," I answered, as
quietly and firmly as I could.

"Surely. But my little feathered children,
dear lady, are only too like other children.
They have their days of perversity; and this
morning was one of them. My wife came in,
as I was putting them back in their cage, and said
she had left you going out alone for a walk. You
told her so, did you not?"

"Certainly."

"Well, Miss Halcombe, the pleasure of
accompanying you was too great a temptation for
me to resist. At my age there is no harm in
confessing so much as that, is there? I seized
my hat, and set off to offer myself as your
escort. Even so fat an old man as Fosco is
surely better than no escort at all? I took
the wrong path—I came back, in despair—and
here I am arrived (may I say it?) at the height
of my wishes."

He talked on, in this complimentary strain,
with a fluency which left me no exertion to
make beyond the effort of maintaining my
composure. He never referred in the most distant
manner to what he had seen in the lane, or to
the letter which I still had in my hand. This
ominous discretion helped to convince me that