They sat silent for some time, the mother regarding her daughter anxiously.

“Natalushka, what are you thinking of?”

The girl started:  her eyes were filled with a haunting fear, as if she had just seen some terrible thing.  And yet she spoke slowly and sadly and wistfully.

“I was thinking, mother, that perhaps it was not so hard to be condemned to die; for then there would come an end to one’s suffering.  And I was wondering whether there had been many women in the world who had to accuse themselves of taking a part in bringing about their own father’s death.  Oh, I hope not—­I hope not!”

A second afterward she added, with more than the bitterness of tears in her trembling voice, “And—­and I was thinking of General von Zoesch’s congratulations, mother.”

CHAPTER LVI.

A COMMISSION.

Lord Evelyn obeyed his friend’s summons in considerable anxiety, if not even alarm; for he made no doubt that it had some connection with that mysterious undertaking to which Brand was pledged; but when he reached Lisle Street, and was shown into the larger room, no very serious business seemed going forward.  Two or three of the best-known to him among the English members of the Society were present, grouped round a certain Irish M.P., who, with twinkling eyes but otherwise grave face, was describing the makeshifts of some provincial manager or other who could not pay his company their weekly salary.  To the further surprise of the new-comer, also, Mr. Lind was absent; his chair was occupied by Gathorne Edwards.

He was asked to go into an inner room; and there he found Brand, looking much more like himself than he had done for some time back.

“It is awfully kind of you, Evelyn, to come at once.  I heard you had returned to town yesterday.  Well, what of the old people down in Wiltshire?”

Lord Evelyn was quite thrown off his guard by this frank cheerfulness.  He forgot the uneasy forebodings with which he had left his house.

“Oh, capital old people!” he said, putting his hat and umbrella on the table—­“excellent.  But you see, Brand, it becomes a serious question if I have to bury myself in the country, and drink port-wine after dinner, and listen to full-blown, full-fed glorious old Tories, every time a sister of mine gets engaged to be married.  And now that Rosalys has begun it, they’ll all take to it, one after the other, like sheep jumping a ditch.”

“They say Milbanke is a very nice young fellow,” said Brand.

“Petted, a little.  But then, an only son, and heaps of money:  perhaps its natural.  I know he is a ghastly hypocrite,” added Lord Evelyn, who seemed to have some little grudge against his brother-in-law in prospect.  “It was too bad of him to go egging on those old megatheria to talk politics until they were red in the face, denouncing Free-trade, and abusing the Ballot, and foretelling the ruin of the former as soon as the Education Act began to work.  Then he pretended to be on their side—­”