“Some time—­we might,” said Dorothea, in a trembling voice.

“When?” said Will, bitterly.  “What is the use of counting on any success of mine?  It is a mere toss up whether I shall ever do more than keep myself decently, unless I choose to sell myself as a mere pen and a mouthpiece.  I can see that clearly enough.  I could not offer myself to any woman, even if she had no luxuries to renounce.”

There was silence.  Dorothea’s heart was full of something that she wanted to say, and yet the words were too difficult.  She was wholly possessed by them:  at that moment debate was mute within her.  And it was very hard that she could not say what she wanted to say.  Will was looking out of the window angrily.  If he would have looked at her and not gone away from her side, she thought everything would have been easier.  At last he turned, still resting against the chair, and stretching his hand automatically towards his hat, said with a sort of exasperation, “Good-by.”

“Oh, I cannot bear it—­my heart will break,” said Dorothea, starting from her seat, the flood of her young passion bearing down all the obstructions which had kept her silent—­the great tears rising and falling in an instant:  “I don’t mind about poverty—­ I hate my wealth.”

In an instant Will was close to her and had his arms round her, but she drew her head back and held his away gently that she might go on speaking, her large tear-filled eyes looking at his very simply, while she said in a sobbing childlike way, “We could live quite well on my own fortune—­it is too much—­seven hundred a-year—­I want so little—­no new clothes—­and I will learn what everything costs.”

CHAPTER LXXXIV.

“Though it be songe of old and yonge,
That I sholde be to blame,
Theyrs be the charge, that spoke so large
In hurtynge of my name.” 
—­The Not-Browne Mayde.

It was just after the Lords had thrown out the Reform Bill:  that explains how Mr. Cadwallader came to be walking on the slope of the lawn near the great conservatory at Freshitt Hall, holding the “Times” in his hands behind him, while he talked with a trout-fisher’s dispassionateness about the prospects of the country to Sir James Chettam.  Mrs. Cadwallader, the Dowager Lady Chettam, and Celia were sometimes seated on garden-chairs, sometimes walking to meet little Arthur, who was being drawn in his chariot, and, as became the infantine Bouddha, was sheltered by his sacred umbrella with handsome silken fringe.

The ladies also talked politics, though more fitfully.  Mrs. Cadwallader was strong on the intended creation of peers:  she had it for certain from her cousin that Truberry had gone over to the other side entirely at the instigation of his wife, who had scented peerages in the air from the very first introduction of the Reform question, and would sign her soul away to take precedence of her younger sister, who had married