No sooner did she hear that Anthony had been, by supposition, seen, than the little light of secret dread flamed a panic through her veins.  She left the table before Master Gammon had finished, and went out of the house to look about for her uncle.  He was nowhere in the fields, nor in the graveyard.  She walked over the neighbourhood desolately, until her quickened apprehension was extinguished, and she returned home relieved, thinking it folly to have imagined her uncle was other than a man of hoarded wealth, and that he was here.  But, in the interval, she had experienced emotions which warned her of a struggle to come.  Who would be friendly to her, and an arm of might?  The thought of the storm she had sown upon all sides made her tremble foolishly.  When she placed her hand in Robert’s, she gave his fingers a confiding pressure, and all but dropped her head upon his bosom, so sick she was with weakness.  It would have been a deceit toward him, and that restrained her; perhaps, yet more, she was restrained by the gloomy prospect of having to reply to any words of love, without an idea of what to say, and with a loathing of caresses.  She saw herself condemned to stand alone, and at a season when she was not strengthened by pure self-support.

Rhoda had not surrendered the stern belief that she had done well by forcing Dahlia’s hand to the marriage, though it had resulted evilly.  In reflecting on it, she had still a feeling of the harsh joy peculiar to those who have exercised command with a conscious righteousness upon wilful, sinful, and erring spirits, and have thwarted the wrongdoer.  She could only admit that there was sadness in the issue; hitherto, at least, nothing worse than sad disappointment.  The man who was her sister’s husband could no longer complain that he had been the victim of an imposition.  She had bought his promise that he would leave the country, and she had rescued the honour of the family by paying him.  At what cost?  She asked herself that now, and then her self-support became uneven.  Could her uncle have parted with the great sum—­have shed it upon her, merely beneficently, and because he loved her?  Was it possible that he had the habit of carrying his own riches through the streets of London?  She had to silence all questions imperiously, recalling exactly her ideas of him, and the value of money in the moment when money was an object of hunger—­when she had seized it like a wolf, and its value was quite unknown, unguessed at.

Rhoda threw up her window before she slept, that she might breathe the cool night air; and, as she leaned out, she heard steps moving away, and knew them to be Robert’s, in whom that pressure of her hand had cruelly resuscitated his longing for her.  She drew back, wondering at the idleness of men—­slaves while they want a woman’s love, savages when they have won it.  She tried to pity him, but she had not an emotion to spare, save perhaps one of dull exultation, that she, alone of women, was free from that wretched mess called love; and upon it she slept.