A Fair Fraud — page 255: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER XIX CROOKTHORPE HALL was once more empty and deserted. All the visitors, welcome and un- welcome, had departed, and nobody was left in the great silent house but its master and mis- tress and the companion. In that curiously rapid way that the con- ditions of life have of adapting themselves to fresh situations, everything went quickly back into the old grooves as though the events of the past few weeks had never been. Marion, moving softly along the empty passages or crossing the wide, deserted rooms, often felt as if the visit of the Lanes and its strange developments must be nothing but a dream. Her old life of dulness and monotony had begun once more—had it indeed ever been interrupted? It was difficult to realise that it had. The daily readings of the newspapers, the quiet meals of three in the big dining-room, where the diminished table seemed lost amidst vast distances of a sombre mahogany back- ground, the drowsy evenings when she played - 244