ast assistance to her, but her husband had
forbidden her to hold communication with him, and she felt a strange
sort of pride, even at this moment, in resolving to obey that
injunction. In all this great city that lay around her there was no
other to whom she could frankly and readily go. That one friend she had
possessed before she came to London: in London she had not made another.

And yet it was necessary to do something, for who could tell but that
her husband might come to this station in search of her? Mairi's
anxiety, too, was increasing every moment, insomuch that she was fairly
trembling with excitement and fatigue. Sheila resolved that she would go
down and throw herself on the tender mercies of that terrible old lady
in Kensington Gore. For one thing, she instinctively sought the help of
a woman in her present plight; and perhaps this harshly-spoken old lady
would be gentle to her when all her story was told. Another thing that
prompted this decision was a sort of secret wish to identify herself
even yet with her husband's family--to prove to herself, as it were,
that they had not cast her off as being unworthy of him. Nothing was
farther from her mind at this moment than any desire to pave the way for
reconciliation and reunion with her husband. Her whole anxiety was to
get away from him, to put an end to a state of things which she had
found to be more than she could bear. And yet, if she had had friends in
London called respectively Mackenzie and Lavender, and if she had been
equally intimate with both, she would at this moment have preferred to
go for help to those bearing the name of Lavender.

There was doubtless something strangely inconsistent in this instinct of
wifely loyalty and duty in a woman who had just voluntarily left her
husband's house. Lavender had desired her not to hold communication with
Edward Ingram: even now she would respect his wish. Lavender would
prefer that she should, in any great extremity, go to his aunt for
assistance and counsel; and to his aunt, despite her own dislike of the
woman, she would go. At this moment, when Sheila's proud spirit had
risen up in revolt against a system of treatment that had become
insufferable to her, when she had been forced to leave her home and
incur the contemptuous compassion of friends and acquaintances, if
Edward Ingram himself had happened to meet her, and had begun to say
hard things of Lavender, she would have sharply recalled him to a