t a whisper of her caring for the thing before
it was too late!

Cornelia now daily trod the red pathways under the firs, and really
imagined herself to be surprised, even vexed, when she met Mr. Barrett
there at last. Emilia was by his side, near a drooping birch. She
beckoned to Cornelia, whose North Pole armour was doing its best to keep
down a thumping heart.

"We are taking our last walk in the old wood," said, Mr. Barrett,
admirably collected. "That is, I must speak for myself."

"You leave early?" Cornelia felt her throat rattle hideously.

"In two days, I expect--I hope," said he.

"Why does he hope?" thought Cornelia, wounded, until a vision of the
detaining Chips struck her with pity and remorse.

She turned to Emilia. "Our dear child is also going to leave us."

"I?" cried Emilia, fierily out of languor.

"Does not your Italy claim you?"

"I am nothing to Italy any more. Have I not said so? I love England now."

Cornelia smiled complacently. "Let us hope your heart is capacious enough
to love both."

"Then your theory is" (Mr. Barrett addressed Cornelia in the winning old
style), "that the love of one thing enlarges the heart for another?"

"Should it not?" She admired his cruel self-possession pitiably, as she
contrasted her own husky tones with it.

Emilia looked from one to the other, fancying that they must have her
case somewhere in prospect, since none could be unconscious of the
vehement struggle going on in her bosom; but they went farther and
farther off from her comprehension, and seemed to speak of bloodless
matters. "And yet he is her lover," she thought. "When they meet they
talk across a river, and he knows she is going to another man, and does
not gripe her wrist and drag her away!" The sense that she had no kinship
with such flesh shut her mouth faster than Wilfrid's injunctions (which
were ordinarily conveyed in too subtle a manner for her to feel their
meaning enough to find them binding). Cornelia, for a mask to her
emotions, gave Emilia a gentle, albeit high-worded lecture on the
artist's duty toward Art, quoting favourite passages from Mr. Barrett's
favourite Art-critic. And her fashion of dropping her voice as she
declaimed the more dictatorial sentences (to imply, one might guess, by a
show of personal humility that she would have you to know her preaching
was vicarious; that she stood humbly in the pulpit, and was but a vessel
for the delivery of the burden of the oracle