Various ideas passed through her mind.  She thought for a moment that she would refuse to take any nourishment in that house.  Her mother would surely not see her die; and would thus have to see her die or else send her forth to be fed.  But that thought stayed with her but for a moment.  It was not only for herself that she must eat and drink, but for her baby.  Then, finding that she could not get to the front windows, and seeing that the time had come in which the carriage should have been there, she went down into the hall, where she found her mother seated on a high-backed old oak armchair.  The windows of the hall looked out on to the sweep before the house; but she was well aware that from these lower windows the plot of shrubs in the centre of the space hindered any view of the gate.  Without speaking to her mother she put her hand upon the lock of the door as though to walk forth, but found it barred.  ’Am I a prisoner?’ she said.

’Yes, Hester; yes.  If you will use such a word as to your father’s house, you are a prisoner.’

’I will not remain so.  You will have to chain me, and to gag me, and to kill me.  Oh, my baby,—­oh, my child!  Nurse, nurse, bring me my boy.’  Then with her baby in her arms, she sat down in another high-backed oak armchair, looking at the hall-door.  There she would sit till her husband should come.  He surely would come.  He would make his way up to those windows, and there she could at any rate hear his commands.  If he came for her, surely she would be able to escape.

The coachman drove back to the town very quickly, and went to the inn at which his horses were generally put up, thinking it better to go to his master thence on foot.  But there he found John Caldigate, who had come across from Mr. Seely’s office.  ‘Where is Mrs. Caldigate?’ he said, as the man drove the empty carriage down the entrance to the yard.  The man, touching his hat, and with a motion of his hand which was intended to check his master’s impetuosity, drove on; and then, when he had freed himself from the charge of his horses, told his story with many whispers.

‘The gardener said she wasn’t to come!’

’Just that, sir.  There’s something up more than you think, sir; there is indeed.  He was that fractious that he wouldn’t hold the hosses for me, not for a minute, till I could go in and see, and then------’

‘Well?’

‘The gates was chained, sir.’

‘Chained?’

’A chain was round the bars, and a padlock.  I never see such a thing on a gentleman’s gate in my life before.  Chained; as nobody wasn’t to go in, nor yet nobody wasn’t to come out!’ The man as he said this wore that air of dignity which is always imparted by the possession of great tidings the truth of which will certainly not be doubted.