Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any programme our fear has sketched¹ out. Fear is almost always haunted by terrible dramatic scenes, which recur² in spite of the best-argued probabilities against them; and during a year that Maggie had had the burthen of concealment³ on her mind, the possibility of discovery had continually presented itself under the form of a sudden meeting with her father or Tom when she was walking with Philip in the Red Deeps. She was aware that this was not one of the most likely events; but it was the scene that most completely symbolized⁴ her inward dread⁵. Those slight indirect suggestions which are dependent on apparently⁶ trivial coincidences and incalculable states of mind, are the favorite machinery⁷ of Fact, but are not the stuff in which Imagination is apt to work.

Certainly one of the persons about whom Maggie’s fears were furthest from troubling themselves was her aunt Pullet, on whom, seeing that she did not live in St. Ogg’s, and was neither sharp-eyed nor sharp-tempered, it would surely have been quite whimsical of them to fix rather than on aunt Glegg. And yet the channel of fatality⁸ — the pathway of the lightning — was no other than aunt Pullet. She did not live at St. Ogg’s, but the road from Garum Firs lay by the Red Deeps, at the end opposite that by which Maggie entered.

The day after Maggie’s last meeting with Philip, being a Sunday on which Mr. Pullet was bound to appear in funeral hatband and scarf at St. Ogg’s church, Mrs. Pullet made this the occasion of dining with sister Glegg, and taking tea with poor sister Tulliver. Sunday was the one day in the week on which Tom was at home in the afternoon; and today the brighter spirits he had been in of late had flowed over in unusually cheerful open chat with his father, and in the invitation, “Come, Magsie, you come too!” when he strolled out with his mother in the garden to see the advancing cherry-blossoms. He had been better pleased with Maggie since she had been less odd and

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