When alone, Emilia wondered why she kept taking long breaths, and tried to correct herself:  but the heart laboured.  Yet she seemed to have no thought in her mind; she had no active sensation of pity or startled self-love.  She went to smooth Mr. Pole’s pillow, as to a place of forgetfulness.  The querulous tyrannies of the invalid relieved her; but the heavy lifting of her chest returned the moment she was alone.  She mentioned it to the doctor, who prescribed for liver, informing her that the said organ conducted one of the most important functions of her bodily system.

Emilia listened to the lecturer, and promised to take his medicine, trusting to be perfectly quieted by the nauseous draught; but when Mr. Powys came, she rushed up to him, and fell with a cry upon his breast, murmuring broken words that Georgiana might fairly interpret as her suspicions directed.  Nor had she ever seen Merthyr look as he did when their eyes next met.

CHAPTER XXIX

The card of Mr. Powys found Arabella alone in the house.  Mrs. Lupin was among village school-children; Mrs. Chump had gone to London to see whether anything was known of Mr. Pole at his office, where she fell upon the youth Braintop, and made him her own for the day.  Adela was out in the woods, contemplating nature; and Cornelia was supposed to be walking whither her stately fancy drew her.

“Will you take long solitary walks unprotected?” she was asked.

“I have a parasol,” she replied; and could hear, miles distant, the domestic comments being made on her innocence; and the story it would be—­“She thinks of no possible danger but from the sun.”

A little forcing of her innocence now was necessary as an opiate for her conscience.  She was doing what her conscience could only pardon on the plea of her extreme innocence.  The sisters, and the fashion at Brookfield, permitted the assumption, and exaggerated it willingly.  It chanced, however, that Adela had reason to feel discontented.  It was a breach of implied contract, she thought, that Cornelia should, as she did only yesterday, tell her that she had seen Edward Buxley in the woods, and that she was of opinion that the air of the woods was bad for her.  Not to see would have been the sisterly obligation, in Adela’s idea—­especially when seeing embraced things that no loving sister should believe.

Bear in mind that we are sentimentalists.  The eye is our servant, not our master; and—­so are the senses generally.  We are not bound to accept more than we choose from them.  Thus we obtain delicacy; and thus, as you will perceive, our civilization, by the aid of the sentimentalists, has achieved an effective varnish.  There, certainly, to the vulgar, mind a tail is visible.  The outrageous philosopher declares vehemently that no beast of the field or the forest would own such a tail. (His meaning is, that he discerns the sign of the animal slinking under the garb of the stately polished creature.  I have all the difficulty in the world to keep him back and let me pursue my course.) These philosophers are a bad-mannered body.  Either in opposition, or in the support of them, I maintain simply that the blinking sentimentalist helps to make civilization what it is, and civilization has a great deal of merit.