’I never said I liked him better,—­how can you talk so, mamma?  I’m going to marry Roger, and there’s an end of it.  I will not be spoken to about it again.’  She got up and left the room.

’Going to marry Roger!  That’s all very fine.  But who is to guarantee his coming back alive!  And if he does, what have they to marry upon, I should like to know?  I don’t wish her to have accepted Mr Henderson, though I am sure she liked him; and true love ought to have its course, and not be thwarted; but she need not have quite finally refused him until—­well, until we had seen how matters turn out.  Such an invalid as I am too!  It has given me quite a palpitation at the heart.  I do call it quite unfeeling of Cynthia.’

‘Certainly,’ began Molly; but then she remembered that her stepmother was far from strong, and unable to bear a protest in favour of the right course without irritation.  So she changed her speech into a suggestion of remedies for palpitation; and curbed her impatience to speak out her indignation at the contemplated falsehood to Roger.  But when they were alone, and Cynthia began upon the subject, Molly was less merciful.  Cynthia said,—­

’Well, Molly, and now you know all!  I’ve been longing to tell you—­and yet somehow I could not.’

‘I suppose it was a repetition of Mr. Coxe,’ said Molly gravely.  ’You were agreeable,—­and he took it for something more.’

‘I don’t know,’ sighed Cynthia.  ’I mean I don’t know if I was agreeable or not.  He was very kind—­very pleasant—­but I did not expect it all to end as it did.  However, it is of no use thinking of it.’

‘No!’ said Molly, simply; for to her mind the pleasantest and kindest person in the world put in comparison with Roger was as nothing; he stood by himself.  Cynthia’s next words,—­and they did not come very soon,—­were on quite a different subject, and spoken in rather a pettish tone.  Nor did she allude again in jesting sadness to her late efforts at virtue.

In a little while Mrs. Gibson was able to accept the often-repeated invitation from the Towers to go and stay there for a day or two.  Lady Harriet told her that it would be a kindness to Lady Cumnor to come and bear her company in the life of seclusion the latter was still compelled to lead; and Mrs. Gibson was flattered and gratified with a dim unconscious sense of being really wanted, not merely deluding herself into a pleasing fiction.  Lady Cumnor was in that state of convalescence common to many invalids.  The spring of life had begun again to flow, and with the flow returned the old desires and projects and plans, which had all become mere matters of indifference during the worst part of her illness.  But as yet her bodily strength was not sufficient to be an agent to her energetic mind, and the difficulty of driving the ill-matched pair of body and will—­one weak and languid, the other strong and stern,—­made her ladyship often very irritable.  Mrs. Gibson