_ Neighbours, also, and
fellow-servants, remarked with malicious curiosity or degrading pity, the
disfigured shape, loose dress, and pale cheeks, of the once beautiful and
still interesting girl. But to no one would she grant her confidence,
answering all taunts with bitter sarcasm, and all serious expostulation
with sullen denial, or with floods of tears.
At length, when Mrs. Saddletree's recovery was likely to permit her
wonted attention to the regulation of her household, Effie Deans, as if
unwilling to face an investigation made by the authority of her mistress,
asked permission of Bartoline to go home for a week or two, assigning
indisposition, and the wish of trying the benefit of repose and the
change of air, as the motives of her request. Sharp-eyed as a lynx (or
conceiving himself to be so) in the nice sharp quillits of legal
discussion, Bartoline was as dull at drawing inferences from the
occurrences of common life as any Dutch professor of mathematics. He
suffered Effie to depart without much suspicion, and without any inquiry.
It was afterwards found that a period of a week intervened betwixt her
leaving her master's house and arriving at St. Leonard's. She made her
appearance before her sister in a state rather resembling the spectre
than the living substance of the gay and beautiful girl, who had left her
father's cottage for the first time scarce seventeen months before.
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