Remarks of this nature read very oddly to Arabella, insomuch that she would question herself at times, in forced seriousness, whether she had dreamed that an evil had befallen Brookfield, or whether Adela were forgetting that it had, in a dream.  One day she enclosed a letter from her father to Mrs. Chump.  Adela did not forge a reply; but she had the audacity to give the words of a message from the woman (in which Mrs. Chump was supposed to say that she could not write while she was being tossed about.) “We must carry it on,” Adela told her sister, with horrible bluntness.  The message savoured strongly of Mrs. Chump.  It was wickedly clever.  Arabella resolved to put it by; but morning after morning she saw her father’s anxiety for the reply mounting to a pitch of fever.  She consulted with Cornelia, who said, “No; never do such a thing!” and subsequently, with a fainter firmness, repeated the negative monosyllable.  Arabella, in her wretchedness, became endued with remorseless discernment.  “It means that Cornelia would never do it herself,” she thought; and, comforted haply by reflecting that for their common good she could do it, she did it.  She repeated an Irish message.  Her father calmed immediately, making her speak it over twice.  He smiled, and blinked his bird’s-eyes pleasurably:  “Ah! that’s Martha,” he said, and fell into a state of comparative repose.  For some hours a sensation of bubbling hot-water remained about the sera of Arabella.  Happily Mrs. Chump in person did not write.

A correspondence now commenced between the fictitious Mrs. Chump on sea and Mr. Pole, dyspeptic, in his armchair.  Arabella took the doctor aside to ask him, if in a hypothetical instance, it would really be dangerous to thwart or irritate her father.  She asked the curate if he deemed it wicked to speak falsely to an invalid for the invalid’s benefit.  The spiritual and bodily doctors agreed that occasion altered and necessity justified certain acts.  So far there was comfort.  But the task of assisting in this correspondence, and yet more, the contemplation of Adela’s growing delight in it (she would now use Irish words, vulgar words, words expressive of physical facts; airing her natural wit in Irish as if she had found a new weapon), became a bitter strain on Arabella’s mind, and she was compelled to make Cornelia take her share of the burden.  “But I cannot conceal—­I cannot feign,” said Cornelia.  Arabella looked at her, whom she knew to be feigning, thinking, “Must I lose my high esteem of both my sisters?” Action alone saved her from denuding herself of this garment.”

“That night!” was now the allusion to the scene at Besworth.  It stood for all the misery they suffered; nor could they see that they had since made any of their own.

A letter with the Dover postmark brought exciting news.