Henrietta was Livia’s guest, her husband having hurried away to Vienna:  ‘To get money! money!’ her angry bluntness explained his absence, and dealt its blow at the sudden astounding poverty into which they had fallen.  She was compelled to practise an excessive, an incredible economy:—­’think of the smallest trifles!’ so that her Chillon travelled unaccompanied, they were separated.  Her iterations upon money were the vile constraint of an awakened interest and wonderment at its powers.  She, the romantic Riette, banner of chivalry, reader of poetry, struck a line between poor and rich in her talk of people, and classed herself with the fallen and pinched; she harped on her slender means, on the enforced calculations preceding purchases, on the living in lodgings; and that miserly Lord Levellier’s indebtedness to Chillon—­large sums! and Chillon’s praiseworthy resolve to pay the creditors of her father’s estate; and of how he travelled like a common man, in consequence of the money he had given Janey—­weakly, for her obstinacy was past endurance; but her brother would not leave her penniless, and penniless she had been for weeks, because of her stubborn resistance to the earl—­quite unreasonably, whether right or wrong—­in the foul retreat she had chosen; apparently with a notion that the horror of it was her vantage ground against him:  and though a single sign of submission would place the richest purse in England at her disposal.  ’She refuses Esslemont!  She insists on his meeting her!  No child could be so witless.  Let him be the one chiefly or entirely to blame, she might show a little tact—­for her brother’s sake!  She loves her brother?  No:  deaf to him, to me, to every consideration except her blind will.’

Here was the skeleton of the love match, earlier than Livia had expected.

It refreshed a phlegmatic lady’s disposition for prophecy.  Lovers abruptly tossed between wind and wave may still be lovers, she knew:  but they are, or the weaker of the two is, hard upon any third person who tugs at them for subsistence or existence.  The condition, if they are much beaten about, prepares true lovers, through their mutual tenderness, to be bitterly misanthropical.

Livia supposed the novel economic pinches to be the cause of Henrietta’s unwonted harsh judgement of her sister-in-law’s misconduct, or the crude expression of it.  She could not guess that Carinthia’s unhappiness in marriage was a spectre over the married happiness of the pair fretted by the conscience which told them they had come together by doing much to bring it to pass.  Henrietta could see herself less the culprit when she blamed Carinthia in another’s hearing.

After some repose, the cousins treated their horrible misadventure as a piece of history.  Livia was cool; she had not a husband involved in it, as Henrietta had; and London’s hoarse laugh surely coming on them, spared her the dread Henrietta suffered, that Chillon would hear; the most sensitive of men on any matter touching his family.