Ovington's Bank by Stanley J. Weyman — Read

While the leaven of uneasiness, fermenting into fear, and liable at any moment to breed panic, worked in Aldersbury, turning the sallow bilious and the sanguine irritable-while the contents of the mail-bag and the _Gazette_ were awaited with growing apprehension, and inklings of the truth, leaking out, were turning to water the hearts of those who depended on the speculators, life at Garth was proceeding after its ordinary fashion. No word of what was impending, or might be impending, travelled so far. No echo of the alarm that assailed the ears of terrified men, forced on a sudden to face unimagined disaster, broke the silence of the drab room, where the Squire sat brooding, or of the garden where Josina spent hours, pacing the raised walk and looking down on that strip of sward where the water skirted the Thirty Acres wood.

That strip of sward where she had met him, that view from the garden were all that now remained to her of Clement, all that proved to her that the past was not a dream; and they did much to keep hope alive in her breast, and to hold her firm in her resolve. So precious indeed were the associations they recalled, that while, with the hardness of a woman who loves elsewhere, she felt little sympathy with Arthur in his disappointment, she actively resented the fact that he had chosen to address her there, and so had profaned the one spot, on which with some approach to nearness, she could dream of Clement.