“Did you not leave your parasol behind you at Ipley?” said Adela, as she met Cornelia in the afternoon.

Cornelia coloured.  Her pride supported her, and she violated fine shades painfully in her response:  “Mr. Barrett left me there.  Is that your meaning?”

Adela was too much shocked to note the courageousness of the reply.  “Well! if all we do is to come into broad daylight!” was her horrified mental ejaculation.

The veil of life was about to be lifted for these ladies.  They found Arabella in her room, crying like an unchastened school-girl; and their first idea was one of intense condemnation—­fresh offences on the part of Mrs. Chump being conjectured.  Little by little Arabella sobbed out what she had heard that day from Mr. Powys.

After the first stupor Adela proposed to go to her father instantly, and then suggested that they should all go.  She continued talking in random suggestions, and with singular heat, as if she conceived that the sensibility of her sisters required to be aroused.  By moving and acting, it seemed to her that the prospect of a vast misery might be expunged, and that she might escape from showing any likeness to Arabella’s shamefully-discoloured face.  It was impossible for her to realize grief in her own bosom.  She walked the room in a nervous tremour, shedding a note of sympathy to one sister and to the other.  At last Arabella got fuller command of her voice.  When she had related that her father’s positive wish, furthered by the doctor’s special injunction to obey it scrupulously, was that they were not to go to him in London, and not to breathe a word of his illness, but to remain at Brookfield entertaining friends, Adela stamped her foot, saying that it was more than human nature could bear.

“If we go,” said Arabella, “the London doctor assured Mr. Powys that he would not answer for papa’s life.”

“But, good heavens! are we papa’s enemies?  And why may Mr. Powys see him if we, his daughters, cannot?  Tell me how Mr. Powys met him and knew of it!  Tell me—­I am bewildered.  I feel that we are cheated in some way.  Oh! tell me something clear.”

Arabella said calmingly:  “Emilia is with papa.  She wrote to Mr. Powys.  Whether she did rightly or not we have not now to inquire.  I believe that she thought it right.”

“Entertain friends!” interjected Adela.  “But papa cannot possibly mean that we are to go through—­to—­the fete on Besworth Lawn, Bella!  It’s in two days from this dreadful day.”

“Papa has mentioned it to Mr. Powys; he desires us not to postpone it.  We...”  Arabella’s voice broke piteously.

“Oh! but this is torture!” cried Adela, with a deplorable vision of the looking-glass rising before her, as she felt the tears sting her eyelids.  “This cannot be!  No father would...not loving us as dear papa does!  To be quiet! to sit and be gay! to flaunt at a fete!  Oh, mercy! mercy!  Tell me—­he left us quite well—­no one could have guessed.  I remember he looked at me from the carriage window.  Tell me—­it must be some moral shock—­what do you attribute it to?  Wilfrid cannot be the guilty one.  We have been only too compliant to papa’s wishes about that woman.  Tell me what you think it can be!”