’To live in the house with Jem, and Jem’s three babies, and yet want rousing!’

‘I have thought,’ said Salome, diffidently, ’that he was only too gentle with her.’

‘Do you know how very severe you are growing, Miss Faithfull?’ said Louis, looking her in the face, in the gravity of amusement.

‘I mean,’ said Miss Faithfull, blushing, ’though of course I do not know, that I have fancied it might be better for both if he could have gone to the root of the matter, and set fairly before her the prime duties requisite in the mistress of such a family.  He may have done so.’

‘I think not,’ said Louis; ’it would be awkward when a woman fancied she embraced poverty voluntarily for his sake.  Poverty!  It was riches compared with their present condition.  Isabel on 150 pounds a-year!  It may well make poor Jem ill to think about it!  I only wonder it is not a brain-fever!’

‘Lord Fitzjocelyn regrets that brain-fever,’ said Miss Faithfull.

’Probably my ideas on the subject are derived from the prevalence of the complaint in light literature,’ said Louis, smiling.  ’It would be more dignified, and suit Isabel better.  Poor Isabel!  I hope I have done her injustice.  She behaved gloriously at the barricades, and has a great soul after all; but I had begun to think heroines not calculated for moderate circumstances.  May they do better in no circumstances at all!  Heighho! how a heavy heart makes one talk nonsense!  So I am to fetch the poor thing home, Miss Faithfull.’

This was determined on, whether with or without James’s consent; Miss Mercy undertaking that she and Martha would help Charlotte, and dispose of the children in the House Beautiful; and she went back with Louis to fetch them, when little Catharine was found peeping through the bars of her prison-gate at the top of the nursery-stairs, shouting lustily for papa.  She graciously accepted her godfather as a substitute, and was carried by him to her kind neighbour’s house, already a supplementary home.  As to her father, Louis found him more refractory than ever.  His only greeting was, ’Why are not you gone home?’ He scorned Mr. Walby’s prescriptions, and made such confident assertions that he should be off to London in the evening, that Fitzjocelyn almost reverted to the brain-fever theory, and did not venture to hint his intention to any one but Charlotte, telling her that he should now almost think her justified in locking the doors.

Sending information to his father, he started for Estminster, very disconsolate, and full of self-reproach for the hasty proceedings which had borne such bitter fruits.  The man and the situation had been an injustice to each other; a sensitive irritable person was the very last to be fit for a position requiring unusual judgment and temper, where his energy had preyed upon itself.  His being placed there had been the work of Louis’s own impetuous scorn