CHAPTER XXXIX.
WINDY BROW.
While North Aston was employing its time in wondering, and Alick
Corfield was breaking his heart in sorrowing, Leam was doing battle with
her despair and distress at Windy Brow--doing the best she could to keep
her senses clear and to live through the penance which she had inflicted
on herself.
So far, Mrs. Pepper's conclusions, based on a badly-gummed envelope,
were right: Miss Gryce of Windy Brow was the sister of Mr. Gryce of
Lionnet, though even Mrs. Pepper did not know that Leam Dundas, under
the name of Leonora Darley, was living with her.
It is not the most obvious agents that are the most influential. The
greatest things in Nature are the work of the smallest creatures, and
our lives are manipulated far more by unseen influences, known only to
ourselves, than by those patent to the world. In all North Aston, Mr.
Gryce was the man who had apparently the least hold on the place and the
slightest connection with the people. He had come there by accident and
by choice lived in retirement, though also by choice he had not been
there a month before he knew all there was to be known of every
individual for miles round. The merest chances had made him personally
acquainted with Sebastian Dundas--those chances his tenancy of Lionnet
and the slight attack of fever which called forth his landlord's
sentiment and pity. Through the father he came to know the daughter,
when the prying curiosity of his nature, his liking for secret influence
and concealed action, together with the kind heart at bottom, and his
real affection for the girl whose confidence he had partly forced and
partly won, threw the whole secret into his hands and made him master of
the situation--the keeper of the seal set against the writings whom no
one suspected of complicity.
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