‘Then the speculations have failed?  So much the better!’

‘No, no! he must tell you—­’

She was trying to withdraw her hand, when Lord Ormersfield opened the door, and in the moment of his amazed ‘Louis!’ Mary had fled.

’What is it? oh! what is it, father? cried Louis for all greeting, ‘why can she say you would not wish it now?’

‘Wish it? wish what?’ asked the Earl, without the intuitive perception of the meaning of the pronoun.

’What you have always wished—­Mary and me—­What is the only happiness that life can offer me!’

‘If I wished it a year ago, I could only wish it the more now,’ said the Earl.  ’But how is this?—­I fully believed you committed to Miss Conway.’

‘Miss Conway!  Miss Conway!’ burst out Louis, in a frenzy.  ’Because Jem Frost was in love with her himself, he fancied every one else must be the same, and now he will be married to her before Christmas, so that’s disposed of.  As to my feeling for her a particle, a shred of what I do for Mary, it was a mere fiction—­a romance, an impossibility.’

’I do not understand you, Louis.  Why did you not find this out before?’

’Mrs. Ponsonby called it my duty to test my feelings, and I have tested them.  That one is a beautiful poet’s dream.  Mary is a woman, the only woman I can ever love.  Not an hour but I have felt it, and now, father, what does she mean?’

’She means, poor girl, what only her own scrupulous delicacy could regard as an objection, but what renders me still more desirous to have a right to protect her.  The cause of our return—­’

‘How?  I thought her father was dead.’

’Far worse.  At Valparaiso we met Robson, the confidential agent.  I learnt from him that Mr. Ponsonby had hardly waited for her mother’s death to marry a Limenian, a person whom everything pointed out as unfit to associate with his daughter.  Even Robson, cautious as he was, said he could not undertake to recommend Miss Ponsonby to continue her journey.’

‘And this was all?’ exclaimed Louis, too intent on his own views for anything but relief.

’All?  Is it not enough to set her free?  She acquiesced in my judgment that she could do no otherwise than return.  She wrote to her father, and I sent three lines to inform him that, under the circumstances, I fulfilled my promise to her mother by taking her home.  I had nearly made her promise that, should we find you about to form an establishment of your own, she would consider herself as my child; but—­’

’Oh, father! how shall we make her believe you care nothing for her scruple?  The wretched man!  But—­oh! where is she?’

‘It does not amount to a scruple in her case,’ deliberately resumed the Earl.  ’I always knew what Ponsonby was, and nothing from him coldd surprise me—­even such an outrage on feeling and decency.  Besides, he has effectually shut himself out of society, and degraded himself beyond the power of interfering with you.  For the rest, Mary is already, in feeling, so entirely my child, that to have the right to call her so has always been my fondest wish.  And, Louis, the months I have spent with her have not diminished my regard.  My Mary! she will have a happier lot than her mother!’