Lady Rowley had written to have a furnished house taken for them from the first of April, and a house had been secured in Manchester Street.  The situation in question is not one which is of itself very charming, nor is it supposed to be in a high degree fashionable; but Nora looked forward to her escape from St. Diddulph’s to Manchester Street as though Paradise were to be re-opened to her as soon as she should be there with her father and mother.  She was quite clear now as to her course about Hugh Stanbury.  She did not doubt that that she could so argue the matter as to get the consent of her father and mother.  She felt herself to be altogether altered in her views of life, since experience had come upon her, first at Nuncombe Putney, and after that, much more heavily and seriously, at St. Diddulph’s.  She looked back as though to a childish dream to the ideas which had prevailed with her when she had told herself, as she used to do so frequently, that she was unfit to be a poor man’s wife.  Why should she be more unfit for such a position than another?  Of course there were many thoughts in her mind, much of memory if nothing of regret, in regard to Mr Glascock and the splendour that had been offered to her.  She had had her chance of being a rich man’s wife, and had rejected it—­had rejected it twice, with her eyes open.  Readers will say that if she loved Hugh Stanbury with all her heart, there could be nothing of regret in her reflections.  But we are perhaps accustomed in judging for ourselves and of others to draw the lines too sharply, and to say that on this side lie vice, folly, heartlessness, and greed and on the other honour, love, truth, and wisdom, the good and the bad each in its own domain.  But the good and the bad mix themselves so thoroughly in our thoughts, even in our aspirations, that we must look for excellence rather in overcoming evil than in freeing ourselves from its influence.  There had been many moments of regret with Nora but none of remorse.  At the very moment in which she had sent Mr Glascock away from her, and had felt that he had now been sent away for always, she had been full of regret.  Since that there had been many hours in which she had thought of her own self-lesson, of that teaching by which she had striven to convince herself that she could never fitly become a poor man’s wife.  But the upshot of it all was a healthy pride in what she had done, and a strong resolution that she would make shirts and hem towels for her husband if he required it.  It had been given her to choose, and she had chosen.  She had found herself unable to tell a man that she loved him when she did not love him and equally unable to conceal the love which she did feel.  ’If he wheeled a barrow of turnips about the street, I’d marry him tomorrow,’ she said to her sister one afternoon as they were sitting together in the room which ought to have been her uncle’s study.

‘If he wheeled a big barrow, you’d have to wheel a little one,’ said her sister.