. John Todhunter
did not betray them at the altar. Perhaps he would rather have married
the mother. He was a man of property, well born, tolerably well educated,
and had, when Mrs. Doria rejected him for the first time, the reputation
of being a fool--which a wealthy man may have in his youth; but as he
lived on, and did not squander his money--amassed it, on the contrary,
and did not seek to go into Parliament, and did other negative wise
things, the world's opinion, as usual, veered completely round, and John
Todhunter was esteemed a shrewd, sensible man--only not brilliant; that
he was brilliant could not be said of him. In fact, the man could hardly
talk, and it was a fortunate provision that no impromptu deliveries were
required of him in the marriage-service.

Mrs. Doria had her own reasons for being in a hurry. She had discovered
something of the strange impassive nature of her child; not from any
confession of Clare's, but from signs a mother can read when, her eyes
are not resolutely shut. She saw with alarm and anguish that Clare had
fallen into the pit she had been digging for her so laboriously. In vain
she entreated the baronet to break the disgraceful, and, as she said,
illegal alliance his son had contracted. Sir Austin would not even stop
the little pension to poor Berry. "At least you will do that, Austin,"
she begged pathetically. "You will show your sense of that horrid woman's
conduct?" He refused to offer up any victim to console her. Then Mrs.
Doria told him her thoughts,--and when an outraged energetic lady is
finally brought to exhibit these painfully hoarded treasures, she does
not use half words as a medium. His System, and his conduct generally
were denounced to him, without analysis. She let him understand that the
world laughed at him; and he heard this from her at a time when his mask
was still soft and liable to be acted on by his nerves. "You are weak,
Austin! weak, I tell you!" she said, and, like all angry and
self-interested people, prophecy came easy to her. In her heart she
accused him of her own fault, in imputing to him the wreck of her
project. The baronet allowed her to revel in the proclamation of a dire
future, and quietly counselled her to keep apart from him, which his
sister assured him she would do.

But to be passive in calamity is the province of no woman. Mark the race
at any hour. "What revolution and hubbub does not that little instrument,
the needle, avert from us!"