Captain Aylmer had not been gone many days before she received a letter from her cousin, in which he spoke with absolute certainty of his intention of giving up the estate.  He had, he said, consulted Mr Green, and the thing was to be done.  ‘But it will be better, I think,’ he went on to say, ’that I should manage it for you till after your marriage.  I simply mean what I say.  You are not to suppose that I shall interfere in any way afterwards.  Of course there will be a settlement, as to which I hope you will allow me to see Mr Green on your behalf.’  In the first draught of his letter he had inserted a sentence in which he expressed a wish that the property should be so settled that it might at last all come to some one bearing the name of Belton.  But as he read this over, the condition for coming from him it would be a condition seemed to him to be ungenerous, and he expunged it.  ’What does it matter who has it,’ he said to himself bitterly, ’or what he is called?  I will never set eyes upon his children, nor yet upon the place when he has become the master of it.’  Clara wrote both to her cousin and to the lawyer, repeating her assurance with great violence, as Lady Aylmer would have said that she would have nothing to with the Belton estate.  She told Mr Green that it would be useless for him to draw up any deeds.  ‘It can’t be made mine unless I choose to have it,’ she said, ‘and I don’t choose to have it.’  Then there came upon her a terrible fear.  What if she should marry Captain Aylmer after all; and what if he, when he should be her husband, should take the property on her behalf!  Something must be done before her marriage to prevent the possibility of such results something as to the efficacy of which for such prevention she could feel altogether certain.

But could she marry Captain Aylmer at all in her present mood?  During these three weeks she was unconsciously teaching herself to hope that she might be relieved from her engagement.  She did not love him.  She was becoming aware that she did not love him.  She was beginning to doubt whether, in truth, she had ever loved him.  But yet she felt that she could not, escape from her engagement if he should show himself to. be really actuated by any fixed purpose to carry it out; nor could she bring herself to be so weak before Lady Aylmer as to seem to yield.  The necessity of not striking her colours was forced upon her by the warfare to which she was subjected.  She was unhappy, feeling that her present position in life was bad, and unworthy of her.  She could have brought herself almost to run away from Aylmer Park, as a boy runs away from school, were it not that she had no place to which to run.  She could not very well make her appearance at Plaistow Hall, and say that she had come there for shelter and succour.  She could, indeed, go to Mrs Askerton’s cottage for awhile; and the more she thought of the state of her affairs, the more did she feel sure that that would, before long, be her destiny.  It must be her destiny unless Captain Aylmer should return at Easter with purposes so firmly fixed that even his mother should not be able to prevail against them.