The ladies were studiously forbearing in their treatment of Mrs. Chump.  Women are wonderfully quick scholars under ridicule, though it half-kills them.  Wilfrid’s theory had impressed the superior grace of civility upon their minds, and, now that they practised it, they were pleased with the contrast they presented.  Not the less were they maturing a serious resolve.  The suspicion that their father had secret vile designs in relation to Mrs. Chump, they kept in the background.  It was enough for them that she was to be a visitor, and would thus destroy the great circle they had projected.  To accept her in the circle, they felt, was out of the question.  Wilfrid’s plain-speaking broke up the air-bubble, which they had so carefully blown, and in which they had embarked all their young hopes.  They had as much as given one another a pledge that their home likewise should be broken up.

“Are you not almost too severe a student?” Mr. Barrett happened to say to Cornelia, the day after Wilfrid had worried her.

“Do I show the signs?” she replied.

“By no means.  But last night, was it not your light that was not extinguished till morning?”

“We soon have morning now,” said Cornelia; and her face was pale as the first hour of the dawn.  “Are you not a late foot-farer, I may ask in return?”

“Mere restlessness.  I have no appetite for study.  I took the liberty to cross the park from the wood, and saw you—­at least I guessed it your light, and then I met your brother.”

“Yes? you met him?”

Mr. Barrett gestured an affirmative.

“And he—­did he speak?”

“He nodded.  He was in some haste.”

“But, then, you did not go to bed at all that night?  It is almost my turn to be lecturer, if I might expect to be listened to.”

“Do you not know—­or am I constitutionally different from others?” Mr. Barrett resumed:  “I can’t be alone in feeling that there are certain times and periods when what I would like to call poisonous influences are abroad, that touch my fate in the days to come.  I know I am helpless.  I can only wander up and down.”

“That sounds like a creed of fatalism.”

“It is not a creed; it is a matter of nerves.  A creed has its ‘kismet.’  The nerves are wild horses.”

“It is something to be fought against,” said Cornelia admonishingly.

“Is it something to be distrusted?”

“I should say, yes.”

“Then I was wrong?”

He stooped eagerly, in his temperate way, to catch sight of her answering face.  Cornelia’s quick cheeks took fire.  She fenced with a question of two, and stood in a tremble, marvelling at his intuition.  For possibly, at that moment when he stood watching her window-light (ah, poor heart!) she was half-pledging her word to her sisters (in a whirl of wrath at Wilfrid, herself, and the world), that she would take the lead in breaking up Brookfield.