in any manner that he might appoint.  She had taken this as a first step, intending to go to Casalunga very shortly, even though she should receive no answer from him.  The parting between her and her mother and father and sisters was very bitter.  Sir Marmaduke, as he had become estranged from Nora, had grown to be more and more gentle and loving with his eldest daughter, and was nearly overcome at the idea of leaving her in a strange land, with a husband near her, mad, and yet not within her custody.  But he could do nothing could hardly say a word toward opposing her.  Though her husband was mad, he supplied her with the means of living; and when she said that it was her duty to be near him, her father could not deny it.

The parting came.  ‘I will return to you the moment you send to me,’ were Nora’s last words to her sister.  ‘I don’t suppose I shall send,’ said Emily.  ‘I shall try to bear it without assistance.’

Then the journey from Italy to England was made without much gratification or excitement, and the Rowley family again found themselves at Gregg’s Hotel.

CHAPTER LXXXVIII

CROPPER AND BURGESS

We must now go back to Exeter and look after Mr Brooke Burgess and Miss Dorothy Stanbury.  It is rather hard upon readers that they should be thus hurried from the completion of hymeneals at Florence to the preparations for other hymeneals in Devonshire; but it is the nature of a complex story to be entangled with many weddings towards its close.  In this little history there are, we fear, three or four more to come.  We will not anticipate by alluding prematurely to Hugh Stanbury’s treachery, or death, or the possibility that he after all may turn out to be the real descendant of the true Lord Peterborough and the actual inheritor of the title and estate of Monkhams, nor will we speak of Nora’s certain fortitude under either of these emergencies.  But the instructed reader must be aware that Camilla French ought to have a husband found for her; that Colonel Osborne should be caught in some matrimonial trap, as how otherwise should he be fitly punished? and that something should be at least attempted for Priscilla Stanbury, who from the first has been intended to be the real heroine of these pages.  That Martha should marry Giles Hickbody, and Barty Burgess run away with Mrs MacHugh, is of course evident to the meanest novel-expounding capacity; but the fate of Brooke Burgess and of Dorothy will require to be evolved with some delicacy and much detail.

There was considerable difficulty in fixing the day.  In the first place Miss Stanbury was not very well and then she was very fidgety.  She must see Brooke again before the day was fixed, and after seeing Brooke she must see her lawyer.  ’To have a lot of money to look after is more plague than profit, my dear,’ she said to Dorothy one day; ‘particularly when you don’t quite know what you ought to do