Lady Rowley, as she travelled back to her house in Manchester Street, almost made up her mind that the separation between her daughter and her son-in-law had better be continued.  It was a very sad conclusion to which to come, but she could not believe that any high-spirited woman could long continue to submit herself to the caprices of a man so unreasonable and dictatorial as he to whom she had just been listening.  Were it not for the boy, there would, she felt, be no doubt upon the matter.  And now, as matters stood, she thought that it should be their great object to regain possession of the child.  Then she endeavoured to calculate what would be the result to her daughter, if in very truth it should be found that the wretched man was mad.  To hope for such a result seemed to her to be very wicked and yet she hardly knew how not to hope for it.

‘Well, mamma,’ said Emily Trevelyan, with a faint attempt at a smile, ‘you saw him?’

’Yes, dearest, I saw him.  I can only say that he is a most unreasonable man.’

‘And he would tell you nothing of Louey?’

‘No dear not a word.’

CHAPTER LXIII

SIR MARMADUKE AT HOME

Nora Rowley had told her lover that there was to be no further communication between them till her father and mother should be in England; but in telling him so, had so frankly confessed her own affection for him and had so sturdily promised to be true to him, that no lover could have been reasonably aggrieved by such an interdiction.  Nora was quite conscious of this, and was aware that Hugh Stanbury had received such encouragement as ought, at any rate to, bring him to the new Rowley establishment, as soon as he should learn where it had fixed itself.  But when at the end of ten days he had not shown himself, she began to feel doubts.  Could it be that he had changed his mind, that he was unwilling to encounter refusal from her father, or that he had found, on looking into his own affairs more closely, that it would be absurd for him to propose to take a wife to himself while his means were so poor and so precarious?  Sir Marmaduke during this time had been so unhappy, so fretful, so indignant, and so much worried, that Nora herself had become almost afraid of him; and, without much reasoning on the matter, had taught herself to believe that Hugh might be actuated by similar fears.  She had intended to tell her mother of what had occurred between her and Stanbury the first moment that she and Lady Rowley were together; but then there had fallen upon them that terrible incident of the loss of the child, and the whole family had become at once so wrapped up in the agony of the bereaved mother, and so full of rage against the unreasonable father, that there seemed to Nora to be no possible opportunity for the telling of her own love-story.  Emily herself appeared to have forgotten it in the midst of her own misery, and had not mentioned Hugh