Adela was once more safe in the Manor, under lock and key, as it were.  He had not spoken of Eldon, though several times on the point of doing so.  It was obvious that the return home cost her suffering, that it was making her ill.  He could not get her to converse; he saw that she did not study.  It was impossible to keep watch on her at all moments of the day; yet how otherwise discover what letters she wrote or received?  He pondered the practicability of bribing her maid to act as a spy upon her, but feared to attempt it.  He found opportunities of secretly examining the blotter on her writing-desk, and it convinced him that she had written to Mrs. Westlake.  It maddened him that he had not the courage to take a single open step, to forbid, for instance, all future correspondence with London.  To do so would be to declare his suspicions.  He wished to declare them; it would have gratified him in. tensely to vomit impeachments, to terrify her with coarseness and violence; but, on the other hand, by keeping quiet he might surprise positive evidence, and if only he did!

She was ill; he had a distinct pleasure in observing it.  She longed for quiet and retirement; he neglected his business to force his company upon her, to laugh and talk loudly.  She with difficulty read a page; he made her read aloud to him by the hour, or write translations for him from French and German.  The pale anguish of her face was his joy; it fascinated him, fired his senses, made him a demon of vicious cruelty.  Yet he durst not as much as touch her hand when she sat before him.  Her purity, which was her safeguard, stirred his venom; he worshipped it, and would have smothered it in foulness.

‘Hadn’t you better have the doctor to see you?’ he began one morning when he had followed her from the dining-room to her boudoir.

‘The doctor?  Why?’

‘You don’t seem up to the mark,’ he replied, avoiding her look.

Adela kept silence.

‘You were well enough in London, I suppose?’

‘I am never very strong.’

‘I think you might be a bit more cheerful.’

‘I will try to be.’

This submission always aggravated his disease—­by what other name to call it?  He would have had her resist him, that he might know the pleasure of crushing her will.

He walked about the room, then suddenly: 

‘What is that man Eldon doing?’

Adela looked at him with surprise.  It had never entered her thoughts that the meeting with Eldon would cost him more than a passing annoyance—­she knew he disliked him—­and least of all that such annoyance would in any way be connected with herself.  It was possible, of course, that some idle tongue had gossiped of her former friendship with Hubert, but there was no one save Letty who knew what her feelings really had been, and was not the fact of her marriage enough to remove any suspicion that Mutimer might formerly have entertained?  But the manner of his question was so singular, the introduction of Eldon’s name so abrupt, that she could not but discern in a measure what was in his mind.