“You may take your oath of that,” said Afy.  “If folks tell true, there was love scenes between them before he ever thought of Lady Isabel.  I had that from Wilson, and she ought to know, for she lived at the Hares’.  Another thing is said—­only you must just believe one word of West Lynne talk, and disbelieve ten—­that if Lady Isabel had not died, Mr. Carlyle never would have married again; he had scruples.  Half a dozen were given him by report; Louisa Dobede for one, and Mary Pinner for another.  Such nonsense!  Folks might have made sure it would be Barbara Hare.  There’s a baby now.”

“Is there?” was the faint answer.

“A beautiful boy three or four months old.  Mrs. Carlyle is not a little proud of him.  She worships her husband.”

“Is she kind to the first children?”

“For all I know.  I don’t think she has much to do with them.  Archibald is in the nursery, and the other two are mostly with the governess.”

“I wonder,” cried the governess, “how the tidings of Lady Isabel’s death were received at East Lynne?”

“I don’t know anything about that.  They held it as a jubilee, I should say, and set all the bells in town to ring, and feasted the men upon legs of mutton and onion sauce afterward.  I should, I know.  A brute animal, deaf and dumb, such as a cow or a goose, clings to its offspring, but she abandoned hers.  Are you going in Madame Vine?”

“I must go in now.  Good evening to you.”

She had sat till she could sit no longer; her very heartstrings were wrung, and she might not rise up in defence of herself.  Defence?  Did she not deserve more, ten thousand times more reproach than had met her ears now?  This girl did not say of her half what the world must say.

“There is a governess?”

“Nearly the first thing that Mr. Carlyle did, after his wife’s moonlight flitting, was to seek a governess, and she has been there ever since.  She is going to leave now; to be married, Joyce told me.”

“Are you much at East Lynne?”

Afy shook her head.  “I am not going much, I can tell you, where I am looked down upon.  Mrs. Carlyle does not favor me.  She knew that her brother Richard would have given his hand to marry me, and she resents it.  Not such a great catch, I’m sure, that Dick Hare, even if he had gone on right,” continued Afy, somewhat after the example of the fox, looking at the unattainable grapes.  “He had no brains to speak of; and what he had were the color of a peacock’s tail—­green.”

To bed at the usual time, but not to sleep.  What she had heard only increased her vain, insensate longing.  A stepmother at East Lynne, and one of her children gliding on to death!  Oh!  To be with them!  To see them once again!  To purchase that boon, she would willingly forfeit all the rest of her existence.