“I was mad!” is a comfortable cloak to our sins in the past.  Mournful to think that we have been bereft of reason; but the fit is over, and we are not in Bedlam!

Cornelia next wrestled with the pride of Mr. Barrett.  Why had he not come to her once after reading the line pencilled in the book?  Was it that he would make her his debtor in everything?  He could have reproached her justly; why had he held aloof?  She thirsted to be scourged by him, to hang her head ashamed under his glance, and hug the bitter pain he dealt her.  Revolving how the worst man on earth would have behaved to a girl partially in his power (hands had been permitted to be pressed, and the gateways of the eyes had stood open:  all but vows had been interchanged), she came to regard Mr. Barrett as the best man on the earth.  That she alone saw it, did not depreciate the value of her knowledge.  A goal gloriously illumined blazed on her from the distance.  “Too late!” she put a curb on the hot courses in her brain, and they being checked, turned all at once to tears and came in a flood.  How indignant would the fair sentimentalist have been at a whisper of her caring for the thing before it was too late!

Cornelia now daily trod the red pathways under the firs, and really imagined herself to be surprised, even vexed, when she met Mr. Barrett there at last.  Emilia was by his side, near a drooping birch.  She beckoned to Cornelia, whose North Pole armour was doing its best to keep down a thumping heart.

“We are taking our last walk in the old wood,” said, Mr. Barrett, admirably collected.  “That is, I must speak for myself.”

“You leave early?” Cornelia felt her throat rattle hideously.

“In two days, I expect—­I hope,” said he.

“Why does he hope?” thought Cornelia, wounded, until a vision of the detaining Chips struck her with pity and remorse.

She turned to Emilia.  “Our dear child is also going to leave us.”

“I?” cried Emilia, fierily out of languor.

“Does not your Italy claim you?”

“I am nothing to Italy any more.  Have I not said so?  I love England now.”

Cornelia smiled complacently.  “Let us hope your heart is capacious enough to love both.”

“Then your theory is” (Mr. Barrett addressed Cornelia in the winning old style), “that the love of one thing enlarges the heart for another?”

“Should it not?” She admired his cruel self-possession pitiably, as she contrasted her own husky tones with it.

Emilia looked from one to the other, fancying that they must have her case somewhere in prospect, since none could be unconscious of the vehement struggle going on in her bosom; but they went farther and farther off from her comprehension, and seemed to speak of bloodless matters.  “And yet he is her lover,” she thought.  “When they meet they talk across a river, and he knows she is going to another man, and does not gripe her wrist and drag her away!”