yet’ suspect her of having done anything wrong.  And then, when he endeavoured to explain to her that a separation would be very injurious to herself, he had coupled her sister with her, thus seeming to imply that the injury to be avoided was of a material kind.  She had better do what he told her, as, otherwise, she and her sister would not have a roof over their head!  That was the nature of the threat which his words were supposed to convey.

The matter had become so serious, that Mrs Trevelyan, haughty and stiff-necked as she was, did not dare to abstain from showing the letter to her sister.  She had no other counsellor, at any rate, till Lady Milborough came, and the weight of the battle was too great for her own unaided spirit.  The letter had been written late at night, as was shown by the precision of the date, and had been brought to her early in the morning.  At first she had determined to say nothing about it to Nora, but she was not strong enough to maintain such a purpose.  She felt that she needed the poor consolation of discussing her wretchedness.  She first declared that she would not see Lady Milborough.  ’I hate her, and she knows that I hate her, and she ought not to have thought of coming,’ said Mrs Trevelyan.

But she was at last beaten out of this purpose by Nora’s argument, that all the world would be against her if she refused to see her husband’s old friend.  And then, though the letter was an odious letter, as she declared a dozen times, she took some little comfort in the fact that not a word was said in it about the baby.  She thought that if she could take her child with her into any separation, she could endure it, and her husband would ultimately be conquered.

‘Yes; I’ll see her,’ she said, as they finished the discussion.  ’As he chooses to send her, I suppose I had better see her.  But I don’t think he does much to mend matters when he sends the woman whom he knows I dislike more than any other in all London.’

Exactly at twelve o’clock Lady Milborough’s carriage was at the door.  Trevelyan was in the house at the time and heard the knock at the door.  During those two or three days of absolute wretchedness, he spent most of his hours under the same roof with his wife and sister-in-law, though he spoke to neither of them.  He had had his doubts as to the reception of Lady Milborough, and was, to tell the truth, listening with most anxious ear, when her Ladyship was announced.  His wife, however, was not so bitterly contumacious as to refuse admittance to his friend, and he heard the rustle of the ponderous silk as the old woman was shown upstairs.  When Lady Milborough reached the drawing-room, Mrs Trevelyan was alone.

‘I had better see her by myself,’ she had said to her sister.

Nora had then left her, with one word of prayer that she would be as little defiant as possible.

‘That must depend,’ Emily had said, with a little shake of her head.