Lady Rowley, as she travelled back to her house in
Manchester Street, almost made up her mind that the
separation between her daughter and her son-in-law
had better be continued. It was a very sad conclusion
to which to come, but she could not believe that any
high-spirited woman could long continue to submit
herself to the caprices of a man so unreasonable and
dictatorial as he to whom she had just been listening.
Were it not for the boy, there would, she felt, be
no doubt upon the matter. And now, as matters
stood, she thought that it should be their great object
to regain possession of the child. Then she endeavoured
to calculate what would be the result to her daughter,
if in very truth it should be found that the wretched
man was mad. To hope for such a result seemed
to her to be very wicked and yet she hardly knew how
not to hope for it.
‘Well, mamma,’ said Emily Trevelyan, with
a faint attempt at a smile, ‘you saw him?’
’Yes, dearest, I saw him. I can only say
that he is a most unreasonable man.’
‘And he would tell you nothing of Louey?’
‘No dear not a word.’
SIR MARMADUKE AT HOME
Nora Rowley had told her lover that there was to be
no further communication between them till her father
and mother should be in England; but in telling him
so, had so frankly confessed her own affection for
him and had so sturdily promised to be true to him,
that no lover could have been reasonably aggrieved
by such an interdiction. Nora was quite conscious
of this, and was aware that Hugh Stanbury had received
such encouragement as ought, at any rate to, bring
him to the new Rowley establishment, as soon as he
should learn where it had fixed itself. But when
at the end of ten days he had not shown himself, she
began to feel doubts. Could it be that he had
changed his mind, that he was unwilling to encounter
refusal from her father, or that he had found, on
looking into his own affairs more closely, that it
would be absurd for him to propose to take a wife
to himself while his means were so poor and so precarious?
Sir Marmaduke during this time had been so unhappy,
so fretful, so indignant, and so much worried, that
Nora herself had become almost afraid of him; and,
without much reasoning on the matter, had taught herself
to believe that Hugh might be actuated by similar
fears. She had intended to tell her mother of
what had occurred between her and Stanbury the first
moment that she and Lady Rowley were together; but
then there had fallen upon them that terrible incident
of the loss of the child, and the whole family had
become at once so wrapped up in the agony of the bereaved
mother, and so full of rage against the unreasonable
father, that there seemed to Nora to be no possible
opportunity for the telling of her own love-story.
Emily herself appeared to have forgotten it in the
midst of her own misery, and had not mentioned Hugh
