"It was in June that the purchase was completed. Did Lord Mount Severn never tell you he had sold it to me?"

"No, never. All these things are yours?" glancing round the room.

"The furniture was sold with the house. Not these sort of things," he added, his eye falling on the silver on the breakfast table; "not the plate and linen."

"Not the plate and linen! Then those poor men who were here yesterday have a right to them," she quickly cried.

"I scarcely know. I believe the plate goes with the entail--and the jewels go also. The linen cannot be of consequence either way."

He smiled as he looked at her; smiled at her simplicity, and assured her that they were nobody's else.

"I did not know," she sighed; "I did not understand. So many strange things have happened in the last day or two, that I seem to understand nothing."

Indeed, she could not understand. She had no definite ideas on the subject of this transfer of East Lynne to Mr. Carlyle; plenty of indefinite ones, and they were haunting her. Fears of debt to him, and of the house and its contents being handed over to him in liquidation, perhaps only partial, were working in her brain.