Letters from Adela kept the Brookfield public informed of the doings on board the yacht.  Before leaving home, Wilfrid with Arabella’s concurrence certainly—­at her instigation, as he thought—­had led his father to imagine, on tolerably good grounds, that Mrs. Chump had quitted Brookfield to make purchases for her excursion on lively waters, and was then awaiting him at the appointed station.  One of the old man’s intermittent nervous fits had frightened them into the quasi-fabrication of this little innocent tale.  The doctor’s words were that Mr. Pole was to be crossed in nothing—­“Not even if it should appear to be of imminent necessity that I should see him, and he refuses.”  The man of science stated that the malady originated in some long continued pressure of secret apprehension.  Both Wilfrid and Arabella conceived that persuasion alone was wanted to send Mrs. Chump flying to the yacht; so they had less compunction in saying, “She is there.”

And here began a terrible trial for the children of Nine Shades.  To save a father they had to lie grievously—­to continue the lie from day to day--to turn it from a lie extensive and inappreciable to the lie minute and absolute.  Then, to get a particle of truth out of this monstrous lie, they had to petition in utter humiliation the woman they had scorned, that she would return among them and consider their house her own.  No answer came from Mrs. Chump; and as each day passed, the querulous invalid, still painfully acting the man in health, had to be fed with fresh lies; until at last, writing of one of the scenes in Brookfield, Arabella put down the word in all its unblessed aboriginal bluntness, and did not ask herself whether she shrank from it.  “Lies!” she wrote.  “What has happened to Bella?” thought Adela, in pure wonder.  Salt-air and dazzling society kept all idea of penance from this vivacious young person.  It was queer that Sit Twickenham should be at the seaside, instead of at Brookfield, wooing; but a man’s physical condition should be an excuse for any intermission of attentions.  “Now that I know him better,” wrote Adela, “I think him the pink of chivalry; and of this I am sure I can convince you, Bella, C. will be blessed indeed; for a delicate nature in a man of the world is a treasure.  He has a beautiful little vessel of his own sailing beside us.”

Arabella was critic enough to smile at this last.  On the whole she was passably content for the moment, in a severe fashion, save to feel herself the dreadful lying engine and fruitlessly abject person that she had become.