“Tell me at once, mamma,” she said one morning, “when you hear that the day is fixed for his marriage.  Pray don’t keep me in the dark.”

“It is to be in February,” said Mrs Dale.

“But let me know the day.  It must not be to me like ordinary days.  But do not look unhappy, mamma; I am not going to make a fool of myself.  I shan’t steal off and appear in the church like a ghost.”  And then, having uttered her little joke, a sob came, and she hid her face on her mother’s bosom.  In a moment she raised it again.  “Believe me, mamma, that I am not unhappy,” she said.

After the expiration of that second week Mrs Dale did write a letter to Crosbie: 

I suppose [she said] it is right that I should acknowledge the receipt of your letter.  I do not know that I have aught else to say to you.  It would not become me as a woman to say what I think of your conduct, but I believe that your conscience will tell you the same things.  If it do not, you must, indeed, be hardened.  I have promised my child that I will send to you a message from her.  She bids me tell you that she has forgiven you, and that she does not hate you.  May God also forgive you, and may you recover his love.

   MARY DALE.

   I beg that no rejoinder may be made to this letter, either
   to myself or to any of my family.

The squire wrote no answer to the letter which he had received, nor did he take any steps towards the immediate punishment of Crosbie.  Indeed he had declared that no such steps could be taken, explaining to his nephew that such a man could be served only as one serves a rat.

“I shall never see him,” he said once again; “if I did, I should not scruple to hit him on the head with my stick; but I should think ill of myself to go after him with such an object.”

And yet it was a terrible sorrow to the old man that the scoundrel who had so injured him and his should escape scot-free.  He had not forgiven Crosbie.  No idea of forgiveness had ever crossed his mind.  He would have hated himself had he thought it possible that he could be induced to forgive such an injury.  “There is an amount of rascality in it,—­of low meanness, which I do not understand,” he would say over and over again to his nephew.  And then as he would walk alone on the terrace he would speculate within his own mind whether Bernard would take any steps towards avenging his cousin’s injury.  “He is right,” he would say to himself; “Bernard is quite right.  But when I was young I could not have stood it.  In those days a gentleman might have a fellow out who had treated him as he has treated us.  A man was satisfied in feeling that he had done something.  I suppose the world is different nowadays.”  The world is different; but the squire by no means acknowledged in his heart that there had been any improvement.