“What did Barbara Hare want?” demanded Miss Carlyle, during dinner.

“She wanted to see me on business,” was his reply, given in a tone that certainly did not invite his sister to pursue the subject.  “Will you take some more fish, Isabel?”

“What was that you were reading over with her?” pursued the indefatigable Miss Corny.  “It looked like a note.”

“Ah, that would be telling,” returned Mr. Carlyle, willing to turn it off with gayety.  “If young ladies choose to make me party to their love letters, I cannot betray confidence, you know.”

“What rubbish Archibald!” quoth she.  “As if you could not say outright what Barbara wants, without making a mystery of it.  And she seems to be always wanting you now.”

Mr. Carlyle glanced at his sister a quick, peculiar look; it seemed to her to speak both of seriousness and warning.  Involuntarily her thoughts—­and her fears—­flew back to the past.

“Archibald, Archibald!” she uttered, repeating the name, as if she could not get any further words out in her dread.  “It—­it—­is never—­that old affair is never being raked up again?”

Now Miss Carlyle’s “old affair” referred to one sole and sore point—­Richard Hare, and so Mr. Carlyle understood it.  Lady Isabel unhappily believing that any “old affair” could only have reference to the bygone loves of her husband and Barbara.

“You will oblige me by going on with your dinner, Cornelia,” gravely responded Mr. Carlyle.  Then—­assuming a more laughing tone—­“I tell you it is unreasonable to expect me to betray a young woman’s secrets, although she may choose to confide them professionally to me.  What say you, Captain Levison?”

The gentleman addressed bowed, a smile of mockery, all too perceptible to Lady Isabel, on his lips.  And Miss Carlyle bent her head over her plate, and went on with her dinner as meek as any lamb.

That same evening, Lady Isabel’s indignant and rebellious heart condescended to speak of it when alone with her husband.

“What is it that she wants with you so much, that Barbara Hare?”

“It is private business, Isabel.  She has to bring me messages from her mother.”

“Must the business be kept from me?”

He was silent for a moment, considering whether he might tell her.  But it was impossible he could speak, even to his wife, of the suspicion they were attaching to Captain Thorn.  It would have been unfair and wrong; neither could he betray that a secret visit was expected from Richard.  To no one in the world could he betray that, however safe and true.

“It would not make you the happier to know it, Isabel.  There is a dark secret, you are aware, touching the Hare family.  It is connected with that.”

She did not put faith in a word of the reply.  She believed he could not tell her because her feelings, as his wife, would be outraged by the confession; and it goaded her anger into recklessness.  Mr. Carlyle, on his part, never gave a thought to the supposition that she might be jealous; he had believed that nonsense at an end years ago.  He was perfectly honorable and true; strictly faithful to his wife, giving her no shadow of cause or reason to be jealous of him; and being a practical, matter-of-fact man, it did not occur to him that she could be so.