Robert turned back at the top of the High Fell pass and stood leaning on his alpenstock, sending a passionate farewell to the gray distant house, the upper window, the copper beech in the garden, the bit of winding road, while the vicar discreetly stepped on northward, his eyes fixed on the wild regions of Martindale.
Mrs.Thornburgh, left alone, absorbed herself to all appearance in the school treat which was to come off in a fortnight, in a new set of covers for the drawing-room, and in Sarah's love affairs, which were always passing through some traffic phase or other, and into which Mrs.Thornburgh was allowed a more unencumbered view than she was into Catherine Leyburn's.

Rose and Agnes dropped in now and then and found her not disposed to talk to them on the great event of the day, Elsmere's absence and approaching departure.

They cautiously communicated to her their own suspicions as to the incident of the preceding afternoon; and Rose gave vent to one fiery onslaught on the 'moral obstacle' theory, during which Mrs.Thornburgh sat studying her with small attentive eyes and curls slowly waving from side to side.

But for once in her life the vicar's wife was not communicative in return.
That the situation should have driven even Mrs.Thornburgh to finesse was a surprising testimony to its gravity.

What between her sudden taciturnity and Catherine's pale silence, the girls' sense of expectancy was roused to its highest pitch.
'They come back to-morrow night,' said Rose, thoughtfully, 'and he goes Saturday--10.20 from Whinborough--one day for the Fifth Act! By the way, why did Mrs.Thornburgh ask us to say nothing about Saturday at home ?' She _had_ asked them, however; and with a pleasing sense of conspiracy they complied.
It was late on Thursday afternoon when Mrs.Thornburgh, finding the Burwood front door open, made her unchallenged way into the hall, and after an unanswered knock at the drawing-room door, opened it and peered in to see who might be there.
'May I come in ?' Mrs.Leyburn, who was a trifle deaf, was sitting by the window absorbed in the intricacies of a heel which seemed to her more than she could manage.