‘You must judge of that,’ said Emily.  ’Perhaps, upon the whole, it will be best.  I can only say that I will not be present.  I will lunch upstairs with baby, and you can make what excuse for me you please.’  This was all very bad, but it was in this way that things were allowed to arrange themselves.  Richard was told that Colonel Osborne was coming to lunch, and when he came something was muttered to him about Mrs Trevelyan being not quite well.  It was Nora who told the innocent fib, and though she did not tell it well, she did her very best.  She felt that her brother-in-law was very wretched, and she was most anxious to relieve him.  Colonel Osborne did not stay long, and then Nora went upstairs to her sister.

Louis Trevelyan felt that he had disgraced himself.  He had meant to have been strong, and he had, as he knew, been very weak.  He had meant to have acted in a high-minded, honest, manly manner; but circumstances had been so untoward with him, that on looking at his own conduct, it seemed to him to have been mean, and almost false and cowardly.  As the order for the exclusion of this hated man from his house had been given, he should at any rate have stuck to the order.  At the moment of his vacillation he had simply intended to make things easy for his wife; but she had taken advantage of his vacillation, and had now clearly conquered him.  Perhaps he respected her more than he had done when he was resolving, three or four days since, that he would be the master in his own house; but it may be feared that the tenderness of his love for her had been impaired.

Late in the afternoon his wife and sister-in-law came down dressed for walking, and, finding Trevelyan in the library, they asked him to join them; it was a custom with them to walk in the park on a Sunday afternoon, and he at once assented, and went out with them.  Emily, who had had her triumph, was very gracious.  There should not be a word more said by her about Colonel Osborne.  She would avoid that gentleman, never receiving him in Curzon Street, and having as little to say to him as possible elsewhere; but she would not throw his name in her husband’s teeth, or make any reference to the injury which had so manifestly been done to her.  Unless Louis should be indiscreet, it should be as though it had been forgotten.  As they walked by Chesterfield House and Stanhope Street into the park, she began to discuss the sermon they had heard that morning, and when she found that that subject was not alluring, she spoke of a dinner to which they were to go at Mrs Fairfax’s house.  Louis Trevelyan was quite aware that he was being treated as a naughty boy, who was to be forgiven.