“Mrs. Berry,” Lucy checked her, “did you expect to find him here?”

“Askin’ that solemn?” retorted Berry.  “What him? your husband?  O’ course I did! and you got him—­somewheres hid.”

“I have not heard from my husband for fifteen days,” said Lucy, and her tears rolled heavily off her cheeks.

“Not heer from him!—­fifteen days!” Berry echoed.

“O Mrs. Berry! dear kind Mrs. Berry! have you no news? nothing to tell me!  I’ve borne it so long.  They’re cruel to me, Mrs. Berry.  Oh, do you know if I have offended him—­my husband?  While he wrote I did not complain.  I could live on his letters for years.  But not to hear from him!  To think I have ruined him, and that he repents!  Do they want to take him from me?  Do they want me dead?  O Mrs. Berry!  I’ve had no one to speak out my heart to all this time, and I cannot, cannot help crying, Mrs. Berry!”

Mrs. Berry was inclined to be miserable at what she heard from Lucy’s lips, and she was herself full of dire apprehension; but it was never this excellent creature’s system to be miserable in company.  The sight of a sorrow that was not positive, and could not refer to proof, set her resolutely the other way.

“Fiddle-faddle,” she said.  “I’d like to see him repent!  He won’t find anywheres a beauty like his own dear little wife, and he know it.  Now, look you here, my dear—­you blessed weepin’ pet—­the man that could see ye with that hair of yours there in ruins, and he backed by the law, and not rush into your arms and hold ye squeezed for life, he ain’t got much man in him, I say; and no one can say that of my babe!  I was sayin’, look here, to comfort ye—­oh, why, to be sure he’ve got some surprise for ye.  And so’ve I, my lamb!  Hark, now!  His father’ve come to town, like a good reasonable man at last, to u-nite ye both, and bring your bodies together, as your hearts is, for everlastin’.  Now ain’t that news?”

“Oh!” cried Lucy, “that takes my last hope away.  I thought he had gone to his father.”  She burst into fresh tears.

Mrs. Berry paused, disturbed.

“Belike he’s travellin’ after him,” she suggested.

“Fifteen days, Mrs. Berry!”

“Ah, fifteen weeks, my dear, after sieh a man as that.  He’s a regular meteor, is Sir Austin Feverel, Raynham Abbey.  Well, so hark you here.  I says to myself, that knows him—­for I did think my babe was in his natural nest—­I says, the bar’net’ll never write for you both to come up and beg forgiveness, so down I’ll go and fetch you up.  For there was your mistake, my dear, ever to leave your husband to go away from ye one hour in a young marriage.  It’s dangerous, it’s mad, it’s wrong, and it’s only to be righted by your obeyin’ of me, as I commands it:  for I has my fits, though I am a soft ’un.  Obey me, and ye’ll be happy tomorrow—­or the next to it.”

Lucy was willing to see comfort.  She was weary of her self-inflicted martyrdom, and glad to give herself up to somebody else’s guidance utterly.