A few days passed without any further incident. Mrs. Blencarrow’s appearance in the meantime had changed in a singular way. Her wonderful self-command was shaken; sometimes she had an air of suppressed excitement, a permanent flush under her eyes, a nervous irritation almost uncontrollable; at other moments she was perfectly pale and composed, but full of an acute consciousness of every sound. She spent a great part of her time in her business-room downstairs, going and coming on many occasions hurriedly, as if by an impulse she could not resist. This could not be hidden from those keen observers, the servants, who all kept up a watch upon her, quickened by whispers that began to reach them from without. Mrs. Blencarrow, on her side, realized very well what must be going on without. She divined the swiftness with which Mrs. Bircham’s information would circulate through the county, and the effect it would produce. Whether it was false or true would make no difference at first. There would be the same wave of discussion, of wonder, of doubt; her whole life would be investigated to see what were the likelihoods on either side, and her recent acts and looks and words all talked over. She was a very proud woman, and her sensations were something like those of a civilized man who is tied to a stake and sees the savages dancing round him, preparing to begin the torture. She expected every moment to see the dart whirl through the air, to feel it quiver in her flesh; the waiting at the beginning, anticipating the first missile, must be, she thought, the worst of all.

She watched for the first sound of the tempest, and Emmy and the servants watched her, the one with sympathy and terror, the others with keen curiosity not unheightened by expectation. She was a good mistress, and some of them were fond of her; some of them were capable of standing by her through good and evil; but it is not in human nature not to watch with excitement the bursting of such a cloud, or to look on without a certain keen pleasure in seeing how a victim—a heroine—will comport herself in the moment of danger. It was to them as good as a play. There were some in her own house who did not believe it; there were some who had long, they said, been suspicious; but all, both those who believed it and those who did not believe it, were keen to see how she would comport herself in this terrible crisis of fate.

The days went by very slowly in this extraordinary tension of spirit; the first stroke came as such a stroke generally does—from a wholly unexpected quarter. Mrs. Blencarrow was sitting one afternoon with Emmy in the drawing-room. The large room looked larger with only these two in it. Emmy, a little figure only half visible, lay in a great chair near the fire, buried in it, her small face showing like a point of whiteness amid the ruddy tones of the firelight and the crimson of the chair. Her mother was on the other side of the fire, with a screen thrown between her and the glow, scarcely betraying her existence at all, in the shade in which she sat, by any movement. The folds of her velvet dress caught the firelight and showed a little colour lying coiled about her feet; but this was all that a spectator would have seen. Emmy was busy with some fleecy white knitting, which she could go on with in the partial darkness; the faint sound of her knitting-pins was audible along with the occasional puff of flame from the fire, or falling of ashes on the hearth. There was not much conversation between them. Sometimes Emmy would ask a question: ‘When are the boys coming home, mamma?’ ‘Perhaps to-day,’ with a faint movement in the darkness; ‘but they are going back to school on Monday,’ Mrs. Blencarrow said, with a tone of relief. It might have been imagined that she said ‘Thank Heaven!’ under her breath. Emmy felt the meaning of that tone as she felt everything, but blamed herself for thinking so, as if she were doing wrong.

‘It is a strange thing to say,’ said Mrs. Blencarrow; ‘but I almost wish they were going straight back to school, without coming home again.’

‘Oh, mamma!’ said Emmy, with a natural protest.

‘It seems a strange thing,’ said Mrs. Blencarrow, ‘to say——’ She had paused between these two last words, and there was a slight quiver in her voice.

She had paused to listen; there was some sound in the clear air, which was once more hard with frost; it was the sound of a carriage coming up the avenue. All was so still around the house that they could hear it for a long way. Mrs. Blencarrow drew a long, shivering breath.

‘There’s somebody coming,’ said Emmy; ‘can it be Rex and Bertie?’

‘Most likely only somebody coming to call. Emmy!’

‘What, mamma?’

‘I was going to say, don’t stay in the room if—if it were. But no, never mind; it was a mistake; I would rather you did stay.’

‘I will do whatever you please, mamma.’

‘Thank you, Emmy. If I turn to you, go. But perhaps there will be no need.’

They waited, falling into a curious silence, full of expectation; the carriage came slowly up to the door; it jingled and jogged, so that they recognised instinctively that it must be the fly from the station.

‘It will be the boys, after all,’ Mrs. Blencarrow said, with something between relief and annoyance. ‘No,’ she added, with a little impatience; ‘don’t run to the door to meet them. It is too cold for you; stay where you are; I can’t have you exposing yourself.’

Something of the irritability of nervous expectation was in her voice, and presently the door opened, but not with the rush of the boys’ return. It was opened by the butler, who came in solemnly, his white shirt shining out in the twilight of the room, and announced in his grandest tone, ‘Colonel and Mr. d’Eyncourt,’ as two dark figures followed him into the room. Mrs. Blencarrow rose to her feet with a low cry. She put her hand unconsciously upon her heart, which leaped into the wildest beating.

‘You!’ she said.

They came forward, one following the other, into the circle of the firelight, and took her hand and kissed her with solemnity. Colonel d’Eyncourt was a tall, slim, soldierly man, the other shorter and rotund. But there was something in the gravity of their entrance which told that their errand was of no usual kind. When Emmy came forward to greet her uncles, they turned to her with a mixture of impatience and commiseration.

‘Are you here, my poor child?’ said one; and the other told her to run away, as they had something particular to say to her mamma.

The butler in the meantime was lighting the candles on the mantelpiece, which made a sudden blaze and brought the two gentlemen into sight.

‘I am sorry I did not know you were coming,’ said Mrs. Blencarrow, recovering her fortitude with the sudden gleam of the light, ‘or I should have sent for you to the station. Preston, bring some tea.’

‘No tea for us,’ said Mr. d’Eyncourt; ‘we have come to see you on family business, if you could give us an hour undisturbed.’

‘Don’t bring any tea, then, Preston,’ she said with a smile, ‘and don’t admit anyone.’ She turned and looked at Emmy, whose eyes were fixed on her. ‘Go and look out for the boys, my dear.’

The two brothers exchanged glances—they were, perhaps, not men of great penetration—they considered that their sister’s demeanour was one of perfect calm; and she felt as if she were being suffocated, as she waited with a smile on her face till her daughter and the footman, who was more deliberate, were gone. Then she sat down again on her low chair behind the screen, which sheltered her a little from the glare of the candles as well as the fire.

‘I hope,’ she said, ‘it is nothing of a disagreeable kind—you both look so grave.’

‘You must know what we have come to talk about, Joan.’

‘Indeed I don’t,’ she said; ‘what is it? There is something the matter. Reginald—Roger—what is it? You frighten me with your grave faces—what has happened?’

The gentlemen looked at each other again; their eyes said, ‘It cannot be true.’ The Colonel cleared his voice; he was the eldest, and it was upon him that the special burden lay.

‘If it is true,’ he said—‘you know best, Joan, whether it is true or not—if it is true, it is the most dreadful thing that has happened in our family.’

‘You frighten me more and more,’ said Mrs. Blencarrow. ‘Something about John?’

John was the black sheep of the D’Eyncourt family. Again the brothers looked at each other.

‘You must be aware of the rumour that is filling the county,’ said the younger brother. ‘I hear there is nothing else talked of, Joan. It is about you—you, whom we have always been so proud of. Both Reginald and I have got letters. They say that you have made a disgraceful marriage; that it’s been going on for years; that you’ve no right to your present name at all, nor to your position in this house. I cannot tell you the half of what’s said. The first letter we paid no attention to, but when we heard it from half a dozen different places—Joan—nothing about John could be half so bad as a story like this about you.’

Mrs. Blencarrow had risen slowly to her feet, but still was in the shade. She did not seem able to resist the impulse to stand up while she was being accused.

‘So this is the reason of your sudden visit,’ she said, speaking with deliberation, which might have meant either inability to speak, or the utmost contempt of the cause.

‘What could we have done else?’ they both cried together, apologetic for the first moment. ‘We, your brothers, with such a circumstantial story,’ said the Colonel.

‘And your nearest friends, Joan; to nobody could it be of so much importance as to us,’ said the other.

‘Us!’ she said; ‘it is of more importance to the children.’

‘My dear girl,’ said the Colonel, putting his hand on her shoulder, ‘I am most thankful we did not trust to letters, but came. It’s enough to look at you. You must give us your authority, and we will soon make an end of these slanderers. By Jove! in the old days it would have been pistols that would have done it.’

‘You can’t use pistols to women,’ said Mr. d’Eyncourt, ‘if you were the greatest fire-eater that ever was.’

They both laughed a little at this, but the soul was taken out of the laugh by the perception slowly dawning upon both that Mrs. Blencarrow had said nothing, did not join either in their laugh or their thankfulness for having come, and had, indeed, slightly shrunk from her brother’s hand, and still stood without asking them to sit down.

‘I’m afraid you are angry with us,’ said Roger d’Eyncourt, ‘for having hurried here as if we believed it. But there never is any certainty in such matters. We thought it better to settle it at once—at the fountain-head.’

‘Yes,’ she said, but no more.

The brothers looked at each other again, this time uneasily.

‘My dear Joan,’ said the Colonel—but he did not know how to go on.

‘The fact is,’ said Mr. d’Eyncourt, ‘that you must give us your authority to contradict it, don’t you know—to say authoritatively that there is not a shadow of truth——’

‘Won’t you sit down?’ said Mrs. Blencarrow.

‘Eh? Ah! Oh yes,’ said both men together. They thought for a moment that she was giving them her ‘authority,’ as they said. The Colonel rolled an easy chair near to her. Roger d’Eyncourt stood up against the glow of the fire.

‘Of course, that is all we want—your word,’ said the Colonel.

She was still standing, and seemed to be towering above him where he sat in that low chair; and there was a dumb resistance in her attitude which made a strange impression upon the two men. She said, after a moment, moistening her lips painfully, ‘You seem to have taken the word of other people against me easily enough.’

‘Not easily; oh no! with great distress and pain. And we did not take it,’ said the younger brother; ‘we came at once, to hear your own——’

He stopped, and there was a dead silence. The Colonel sat bending forward into the comparative gloom in which she stood, and Roger d’Eyncourt turned to her in an attitude of anxious attention; but she made no further reply.

‘Joan, for God’s sake say something! Don’t you see that pride is out of the question in such circumstances? We must have a distinct contradiction. Heavens! here’s someone coming, after all.’

There was a slight impatient tap at the door, and then it was opened quickly, as by someone who had no mind to be put back. They all turned towards the new-comer, the Colonel whirling his chair round with annoyance. It was Brown—Mrs. Blencarrow’s agent or steward. He was a tall young man with a well-developed, athletic figure, his head covered with those close curling locks which give an impression of vigour and superabundant life. He came quickly up to Mrs. Blencarrow with some papers in his hand and said something to her, which, in their astonishment and excitement, the brothers did not make out. He had the slow and low enunciation of the North-country, to which their ear was not accustomed. She answered him with almost painful distinctness.

‘Oh, the papers about Appleby’s lease. Put them on the table, please.’

He went to the table and put them down, turned for a moment undecided, and then joined the group, which watched him with a surprised and hostile curiosity, so far as the brothers were concerned. She turned her face towards him with a fixed, imperious look.

‘I forgot,’ she said hurriedly; ‘I think you have both seen my agent, Mr. Brown.’

Roger d’Eyncourt gave an abrupt nod of recognition; the Colonel only gazed from his chair.

‘I thought Mr. Brown had been your steward, Joan.’

‘He is my—everything that is serviceable and trustworthy,’ she said.

The words seemed to vibrate in the air, so full of meaning were they, and she herself to thrill with some strong sentiment which fixed her look upon this man. He paused a little as if he intended to speak, but after a minute’s uncertainty, with a rustic inclination of his head, went slowly away. Mrs. Blencarrow dropped suddenly into her chair as the door closed, as if some tremendous tension had relaxed. The brothers looked wonderingly at each other again. ‘That is all very well; the people you employ are in your own hands; but this is of far more consequence.’

‘Joan,’ said the Colonel, ‘I don’t know what to think. For God’s sake answer one way or another! Why don’t you speak? For the sake of your children, for the sake of your own honour, your credit, your family—Is it true?’

‘Hush, Rex! Of course we know it isn’t true. But, Joan, be reasonable, my dear; let’s have your word for it, that we may face the world. Of course we know well enough that you’re the last woman to dishonour Blencarrow’s memory—poor old fellow! who was so fond of you—and deceive everybody.’

‘You seem to have believed me capable of all that, or you would not have come here!’

‘No, Joan, no—not so. Do, for God’s sake, take the right view of it! Tell us simply that you are not married, and have never thought of such a thing, which I for one am sure of to begin with.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said, with a curious hard note of a laugh, ‘they have told you, having told you so much, whom I am supposed to have married, as you say.’

Again they looked at each other. ‘No one,’ said the Colonel, ‘has told us that.’

She laughed again. ‘Then if this is all you know, and all I am accused of, to have married no one knows who, no one knows when, you must come to what conclusion you please, and make what discoveries you can. I have nothing to say.’

‘Joan!’ they both cried.

‘You must do exactly what seems good to you,’ she said, rising hastily. ‘Find out what you can, say what you like—you shall not have a word from me.’