“I don’t think he means that,” said Mrs. Clavering.  “He only wants to make you understand that you’d better remain at the Park.”

“But if you knew what a house it is to be all alone in!”

“Dear Hermione, I do know!  But you must come to us oftener, and let us endeavor to make it better for you.”

“But how can I do that?  How can I come to his uncle’s house, just because my own husband has made my own home so wretched that I cannot bear it.  I’m ashamed to do that.  I ought not to be telling you all this, of course.  I don’t know what he’d do if he knew it; but it is so hard to bear it all without telling some one.”

“My poor dear!”

“I sometimes think I’ll ask Mr. Clavering to speak to him, and to tell him at once that I will not submit to it any longer.  Of course he would be mad with rage, but if he were to kill me I should like it better than having to go on in this way.  I’m sure he is only waiting for me to die.”

Mrs. Clavering said all that she could to comfort the poor woman, but there was not much that she could say.  She had strongly advocated the plan of having Lady Ongar at the Park, thinking perhaps that Harry would be more safe while that lady was at Clavering, than he might perhaps be if she remained in London.  But Mrs. Clavering doubted much whether Lady Ongar would consent to make such a visit.  She regarded Lady Ongar as a hard, worldly, pleasure-seeking woman—­sinned against perhaps in much, but also sinning in much herself—­to whom the desolation of the Park would be even more unendurable than it was to the elder sister.  But of this, of course, she said nothing.  Lady Clavering left her, somewhat quieted, if not comforted; and went back to pass her last evening with her husband.

“Upon second thought, I’ll go by the first train,” he said, as he saw her for a moment before she went up to dress.  “I shall have to be off from here a little after six, but I don’t mind that in Summer.”  Thus she was to be deprived of such gratification as there might have been in breakfasting with him on the last morning!  It might be hard to say in what that gratification would have consisted.  She must by this time have learned that his presence gave her none of the pleasures usually expected from society.  He slighted her in everything.  He rarely vouchsafed to her those little attentions which all women expect from all gentlemen.  If he handed her a plate, or cut for her a morsel of bread from the loaf, he showed by his manner, and by his brow, that the doing so was a nuisance to him.  At their meals he rarely spoke to her—­having always at breakfast a paper or a book before him, and at dinner devoting his attention to a dog at his feet.  Why should she have felt herself cruelly ill-used in this matter of his last breakfast—­so cruelly ill-used that she wept afresh over it as she dressed herself—­seeing that she would lose so little?  Because she loved the man; loved him, though she now thought that she