A month had passed when Adrian wrote this letter.  He was very comfortable; so of course he thought Time was doing his duty.  Not a word did he say of Richard’s return, and for some reason or other neither Richard nor Lucy spoke of it now.

Lady Blandish wrote back:  “His father thinks he has refused to come to him.  By your utter silence on the subject, I fear that it must be so.  Make him come.  Bring him by force.  Insist on his coming.  Is he mad?  He must come at once.”

To this Adrian replied, after a contemplative comfortable lapse of a day or two, which might be laid to his efforts to adopt the lady’s advice, “The point is that the half man declines to come without the whole man.  The terrible question of sex is our obstruction.”

Lady Blandish was in despair.  She had no positive assurance that the baronet would see his son; the mask put them all in the dark; but she thought she saw in Sir Austin irritation that the offender, at least when the opening to come and make his peace seemed to be before him, should let days and weeks go by.  She saw through the mask sufficiently not to have any hope of his consenting to receive the couple at present; she was sure that his equanimity was fictitious; but she pierced no farther, or she might have started and asked herself, Is this the heart of a woman?

The lady at last wrote to Richard.  She said:  “Come instantly, and come alone.”  Then Richard, against his judgment, gave way.  “My father is not the man I thought him!” he exclaimed sadly, and Lucy felt his eyes saying to her:  “And you, too, are not the woman I thought you.”  Nothing could the poor little heart reply but strain to his bosom and sleeplessly pray in his arms all the night.

CHAPTER XXXV

Three weeks after Richard arrived in town, his cousin Clare was married, under the blessings of her energetic mother, and with the approbation of her kinsfolk, to the husband that had been expeditiously chosen for her.  The gentleman, though something more than twice the age of his bride, had no idea of approaching senility for many long connubial years to come.  Backed by his tailor and his hairdresser, he presented no such bad figure at the altar, and none would have thought that he was an ancient admirer of his bride’s mama, as certainly none knew he had lately proposed for Mrs. Doria before there was any question of her daughter.  These things were secrets; and the elastic and happy appearance of Mr. John Todhunter did not betray them at the altar.  Perhaps he would rather have married the mother.  He was a man of property, well born, tolerably well educated, and had, when Mrs. Doria rejected him for the first time, the reputation of being a fool—­which a wealthy man may have in his youth; but as he lived on, and did not squander his money—­amassed it, on the contrary, and did not seek to go into Parliament, and did other negative wise things, the world’s opinion, as usual, veered completely round, and John Todhunter was esteemed a shrewd, sensible man—­only not brilliant; that he was brilliant could not be said of him.  In fact, the man could hardly talk, and it was a fortunate provision that no impromptu deliveries were required of him in the marriage-service.