A vain woman might have been flattered, perhaps allured, by this persistence.  In Christian it produced only repulsion, actual hatred, if so gentle a spirit could hate.  An honest love from the very humblest man alive, she would have been tender over; but this, which to her, a wife, was necessarily utter insult and wickedness, awoke in her nothing but abhorrence—­the same sort of righteous abhorrence that she would have felt—­she knew she would—­toward any woman who had tried to win her husband from herself.  Win her husband?  The fancy almost made her smile, and then filled her with a brimming sense of joy that he was—­ what he was, a man to whom the bare idea of loving any woman but his own wife was so impossible that it became actually ludicrous.

She smiled, she even laughed, with an ever-growing sense of all he was to her and she to him, when she heard him open his study-door and call “Christian.”

She went quickly, to explain in a word or two, before they went down to dinner, her rencontre with Sir Edwin Uniacke.  Afterward, in their long, quiet evenings, to which she so looked forward, she would tell her husband the whole story, and give herself the comfort of feeling that now at last he was fully acquainted with her whole outer life and inmost soul, as a husband ought to be.

But there stood the two aunts, one stately and grim, the other silent and tearful; and it took all Dr. Grey’s winning ways to smooth matters so as to make their last meal together before the separation any thing like a peaceful one.

He seemed so anxious for this—­nervously anxious—­that his wife forgot every thing in helping him to put a cheerful face on every thing.  And when she watched him, finding a pleasant word for every one, and patient even with Miss Gascoigne, who today seemed in her sharpest mood, gray-haired, quaint, and bookish-looking as he was, it appeared to Christian that not a young man living could bear a moment’s comparison with Dr. Arnold Grey.

He tried his best, and she tried her best but it was rather a dull dinner, and she found no opportunity to say, as at last she had decided to say publicly, just as a piece of news, no more, that she had today met Sir Edwin Uniacke.  And so it befell that the first who told the fact was Arthur, blurting out between his strawberries, “Oh, papa I want you to let me go to a place called Lake Hall.”

“Lake Hall?”

“Yes; the owner of it invited me there; he did, indeed.  He is the kindest, pleasantest gentleman I ever met.  A ‘Sir,’ too.  His name is Sir Edwin Uniacke.”

“My boy, where did you meet Sir Edwin Uniacke?”

So the whole story came out.  Dr. Grey listened in grave silence—­even a little displeasure, or something less like displeasure than pain.  At length, he said,

“I think you must have made some mistake, Arthur.  Your mother could never have allowed—­”

“She did not say she would allow me to go.  She looked rather vexed; I don’t think she liked Sir Edwin Uniacke.  And if she is very much against my going—­well, I won’t go,” said Arthur, heroically.