.

When alone, Emilia wondered why she kept taking long breaths, and tried
to correct herself: but the heart laboured. Yet she seemed to have no
thought in her mind; she had no active sensation of pity or startled
self-love. She went to smooth Mr. Pole's pillow, as to a place of
forgetfulness. The querulous tyrannies of the invalid relieved her; but
the heavy lifting of her chest returned the moment she was alone. She
mentioned it to the doctor, who prescribed for liver, informing her that
the said organ conducted one of the most important functions of her
bodily system.

Emilia listened to the lecturer, and promised to take his medicine,
trusting to be perfectly quieted by the nauseous draught; but when Mr.
Powys came, she rushed up to him, and fell with a cry upon his breast,
murmuring broken words that Georgiana might fairly interpret as her
suspicions directed. Nor had she ever seen Merthyr look as he did when
their eyes next met.

CHAPTER XXIX

The card of Mr. Powys found Arabella alone in the house. Mrs. Lupin was
among village school-children; Mrs. Chump had gone to London to see
whether anything was known of Mr. Pole at his office, where she fell upon
the youth Braintop, and made him her own for the day. Adela was out in
the woods, contemplating nature; and Cornelia was supposed to be walking
whither her stately fancy drew her.

"Will you take long solitary walks unprotected?" she was asked.

"I have a parasol," she replied; and could hear, miles distant, the
domestic comments being made on her innocence; and the story it would
be--"She thinks of no possible danger but from the sun."

A little forcing of her innocence now was necessary as an opiate for her
conscience. She was doing what her conscience could only pardon on the
plea of her extreme innocence. The sisters, and the fashion at
Brookfield, permitted the assumption, and exaggerated it willingly. It
chanced, however, that Adela had reason to feel discontented. It was a
breach of implied contract, she thought, that Cornelia should, as she did
only yesterday, tell her that she had seen Edward Buxley in the woods,
and that she was of opinion that the air of the woods was bad for her.
Not to see would have been the sisterly obligation, in Adela's
idea--especially when seeing embraced things that no loving sister should
believe.

Bear in mind that we are sentimentalists. The eye is our servant, not our
master; and--so are the senses generally.