“It was very impertinent”

“Perhaps it was ill-bred, as he must have suspected something as to Lord Rufford.  However we are here now.”

“I will never allow you to drag me anywhere again.”

“It will be for yourself to judge of that.  If I want to go anywhere, I shall go.  What’s the good of quarrelling?  You know that I mean to have my way.”

The next morning neither Lady Augustus nor Miss Trefoil came down to breakfast, but at ten o’clock Arabella was ready, as appointed, to be taken into the sick man’s bedroom.  She was still dressed in black but had taken some trouble with her face and hair.  She followed Lady Ushant in, and silently standing by the bedside put her hand upon that of John Morton which was laying outside on the bed.  “I will leave you now, John,” said Lady Ushant retiring, “and come again in half an hour,”

“When I ring,” he said.

“You mustn’t let him talk for more than that,” said the old lady to Arabella as she went.

It was more than an hour afterwards when Arabella crept into her mother’s room, during which time Lady Ushant had twice knocked at her nephew’s door and had twice been sent away.  “It is all over, mamma!” she said.

Lady Augustus looked into her daughter’s eyes and saw that she had really been weeping.  “All over!”

“I mean for me,—­and you.  We have only got to go away.”

“Will he die?”

“It will make no matter though he should live for ever.  I have told him everything.  I did not mean to do it because I thought that he would be weak; but he has been strong enough for that”

“What have you told him?”

“Just everything—­about you and Lord Rufford and myself,—­and what an escape he had had not to marry me.  He understands it all now.”

“It is a great deal more than I do.”

“He knows that Lord Rufford has been engaged to me.”  She clung to this statement so vehemently that she had really taught herself to believe that it was so.

“Well!”

“And he knows also how his lordship is behaving to me.  Of course he thinks that I have deserved it.  Of course I have deserved it.  We have nothing to do now but to go back to London.”

“You have brought me here all the way for that”

“Only for that!  As the man was dying I thought that I would be honest just for once.  Now. that I have told him I don’t believe that he will die.  He does not look to be so very ill.”

“And you have thrown away that chance!”

“Altogether.  You didn’t like Bragton you know, and therefore it can’t matter to you.”

“Like it!”

“To be sure you would have got rid of me had I gone to Patagonia.  But he will not go to Patagonia now even if he gets well; and so there was nothing to be gained.  The carriage is to be here at two to take us to the station and you may as well let Judith come and put the things up.”