“It is hard,” said he; and when he felt the pressure of her hand, and saw the brightness of her eye, and when her dress rustled against him as he followed her to her seat, and he became sensible of the influence of her presence, all his diplomacy vanished, and he was simply desirous of devoting himself to her service. Of course, any such devotion was to be given without detriment to that other devotion which he owed to Florence Burton. But this stipulation, though it was made, was made quickly, and with a confused brain.
“Yes—it is hard,” she said. “Harry, sometimes I think I shall go mad. It is more than I can bear. I could bear it if it hadn’t been my own fault—all my own fault.”
There was a suddenness about this which took him quite by surprise. No doubt it had been her own fault. He also had told himself that; though, of course, he would make no such charge to her. “You have not recovered yet,” he said, “from what you have suffered lately. Things will look brighter to you after a while.”
“Will they? Ah—I do not know. But come, Harry; come and sit down, and let me get you some tea. There is no harm, I suppose, in having you here—is there?”
“Harm, Lady Ongar?”
“Yes—harm, Lady Ongar.” As she repeated her own name after him, nearly in his tone, she smiled once again; and then she looked as she used to look in the old days, when she would be merry with him. “It is hard to know what a woman may do, and what she may not. When my husband was ill and dying, I never left his bedside. From the moment of my marrying him till his death, I hardly spoke to a man but in his presence; and when once I did, it was he that had sent him. And for all that people have turned their backs upon me. You and I were old friends, Harry, and something more once—were we not? But I jilted you, as you were man enough to tell me. How I did respect you when you dared to speak the truth to me. Men don’t know women, or they would be harder to them.”
“I did not mean to be hard to you.”
“If you had taken me by the shoulders and shaken me, and have declared that before God you would not allow such wickedness, I should have obeyed you. I know I should.” Harry thought of Florence, and could not bring himself to say that he wished it had been so. “But where would you have been then, Harry? I was wrong and false and a beast to marry that man; but I should not, therefore, have been right to marry you and ruin you. It would have been ruin, you know, and we should simply have been fools.”
“The folly was very pleasant,” said he.
“Yes, yes; I will not deny that. But then the wisdom and the prudence afterwards! Oh, Harry, that was not pleasant. That was not pleasant! But what was I saying? Oh! about the propriety of your being here. It is so hard to know what is proper. As I have been married, I suppose I may receive whom I please. Is not that the law?”
“You may receive me, I should think. Your sister is my cousin’s wife.” Harry’s matter-of-fact argument did as well as anything else, for it turned her thought at the moment.
“My sister, Harry! If there was nothing to make us friends but our connection through Sir Hugh Clavering, I do not know that I should be particularly anxious to see you. How unmanly he has been, and how cruel.”
“Very cruel,” said Harry. Then he thought of Archie and Archie’s suit. “But he is willing to change all that now. Hermione asked me the other day to persuade you to go to Clavering.”
“And have you come here to use your eloquence for that purpose? I will never go to Clavering again, Harry, unless it should be yours and your wife should offer to receive me. Then I’d pack up for the dear, dull, solemn old place though I was on the other side of Europe.”
“It will never be mine.”
“Probably not, and probably, therefore, I shall never be there again. No; I can forgive an injury, but not an insult—not an insult such as that. I will not go to Clavering; so, Harry, you may save your eloquence. Hermione I shall be glad to see whenever she will come to me. If you can persuade her to that, you will persuade her to a charity.”
“She goes nowhere, I think, without his—his—”
“Without his permission. Of course she does not. That, I suppose, is all as it should be. And he is such a tyrant that he will give no such permission. He would tell her, I suppose, that her sister was no fit companion for her.”
“He could not say that now, as he has asked you there.”
“Ah, I don’t know that. He would say one thing first and another after, just as it would suit him. He has some object in wishing that I should go there, I suppose.” Harry, who knew the object, and who was too faithful to betray Lady Clavering, even though he was altogether hostile to his cousin Archie’s suit, felt a little proud of his position, but said nothing in answer to this. “But I shall not go; nor will I see him, or go to his house when he comes up to London. When do they
