“Very well.  Will you have some tea?” And then the whole thing was finished.

On the next day she went after lunch to her mother’s house, and never came back again to Princess Royal Crescent.  During that morning she packed up those things which she cared to pack herself, and sent her sisters there, with an old family servant, to bring away whatever else might be supposed to belong to her.  “Dear, dear,” said Amelia, “what trouble I had in getting these things together for them, and only the other day.  I can’t but think she’s wrong to go away.”

“I don’t know,” said Margaretta.  “She has not been so lucky as you have in the man she has married.  I always felt that she would find it difficult to manage him.”

“But, my dear, she has not tried.  She has given up at once.  It isn’t management that was wanting.  The fact is that when Alexandrina began she didn’t make up her mind to the kind of thing she was coming to.  I did.  I knew it wasn’t to be all party-going and that sort of thing.  But I must own that Crosbie isn’t the same sort of man as Mortimer.  I don’t think I could have gone on with him.  You might as well have those small books put up; he won’t care about them.”  And in this way Crosbie’s house was dismantled.

She saw him no more, for he made no farewell visit to the house in Portman Square.  A note had been brought to him at his office:  “I am here with mamma, and may as well say good-bye now.  We start on Tuesday.  If you wish to write, you can send your letters to the housekeeper here.  I hope you will make yourself comfortable, and that you will be well.  Yours affectionately, A. C.”  He made no answer to it, but went that day and dined at his club.

“I haven’t seen you this age,” said Montgomerie Dobbs.

“No.  My wife is going abroad with her mother, and while she is away I shall come back here again.”

There was nothing more said to him, and no one ever made any inquiry about his domestic affairs.  It seemed to him now as though he had no friend sufficiently intimate with him to ask him after his wife or family.  She was gone, and in a month’s time he found himself again in Mount Street,—­beginning the world with five hundred a year, not six.  For Mr Gazebee, when the reckoning came, showed him that a larger income at the present moment was not possible for him.  The countess had for a long time refused to let Lady Alexandrina go with her on so small a pittance as four hundred and fifty;—­and then were there not the insurances to be maintained?

But I think he would have consented to accept his liberty with three hundred a year,—­so great to him was the relief.

CHAPTER LVII

Lilian Dale Vanquishes Her Mother