Stanbury’s name since they had been in Manchester Street.  We have all felt how on occasions our own hopes and fears, nay, almost our own individuality, become absorbed in and obliterated by the more pressing cares and louder voices of those around us.  Nora hardly dared to allude to herself while her sister’s grief was still so prominent, and while her father was daily complaining of his own personal annoyances at the Colonial Office.  It seemed to her that at such a moment she could not introduce a new matter for dispute, and perhaps a new subject of dismay.

Nevertheless, as the days passed by, and as she saw nothing of Hugh Stanbury, her heart became sore and her spirit vexed.  It seemed to her that if she were now deserted by him, all the world would be over for her.  The Glascock episode in her life had passed by, that episode which might have been her history, which might have been a history so prosperous, so magnificent, and probably so happy.  As she thought of herself and of circumstances as they had happened to her, of the resolutions which she had made as to her own career when she first came to London, and of the way in which she had thrown all those resolutions away in spite of the wonderful success which had come in her path, she could not refrain from thinking that she had brought herself to shipwreck by her own indecision.  It must not be imagined that she regretted what she had done.  She knew very well that to have acted otherwise than she did when Mr Glascock came to her at Nuncombe Putney would have proved her to be heartless, selfish, and unwomanly.  Long before that time she had determined that it was her duty to marry a rich man and, if possible, a man in high position.  Such a one had come to her, one endowed with all the good things of the world beyond her most sanguine expectation, and she had rejected him!  She knew that she had been right because she had allowed herself to love the other man.  She did not repent what she had done, the circumstances being as they were, but she almost regretted that she had been so soft in heart, so susceptible of the weakness of love, so little able to do as she pleased with herself.  Of what use to her was it that she loved this man with all her strength of affection when he never came to her, although the time at which he had been told that he might come was now ten days past?

She was sitting one afternoon in the drawing-room listlessly reading, or pretending to read, a novel, when, on a sudden, Hugh Stanbury was announced.  The circumstances of the moment were most unfortunate for such a visit.  Sir Marmaduke, who had been down at Whitehall in the morning, and from thence had made a journey to St. Diddulph’s-in-the-East and back, was exceedingly cross and out of temper.  They had told him at his office that they feared he would not suffice to carry through the purpose for which he had been brought home.  And his brother-in-law, the parson, had expressed to him an opinion that he