with him. 'She is outside in the
carriage,' said Mrs. Dornell gently.

'What--Betty?'

'Yes.'

'Why didn't you tell me?' Dornell rushed out, and there was the girl
awaiting his forgiveness, for she supposed herself, no less than her
mother, to be under his displeasure.

Yes, Betty had left school, and had returned to King's-Hintock. She was
nearly seventeen, and had developed to quite a young woman. She looked
not less a member of the household for her early marriage-contract, which
she seemed, indeed, to have almost forgotten. It was like a dream to
her; that clear cold March day, the London church, with its gorgeous
pews, and green-baize linings, and the great organ in the west gallery--so
different from their own little church in the shrubbery of King's-Hintock
Court--the man of thirty, to whose face she had looked up with so much
awe, and with a sense that he was rather ugly and formidable; the man
whom, though they corresponded politely, she had never seen since; one to
whose existence she was now so indifferent that if informed of his death,
and that she would never see him more, she would merely have replied,
'Indeed!' Betty's passions as yet still slept.

'Hast heard from thy husband lately?' said Squire Dornell, when they were
indoors, with an ironical laugh of fondness which demanded no answer.

The girl winced, and he noticed that his wife looked appealingly at him.
As the conversation went on, and there were signs that Dornell would
express sentiments that might do harm to a position which they could not
alter, Mrs. Dornell suggested that Betty should leave the room till her
father and herself had finished their private conversation; and this
Betty obediently did.

Dornell renewed his animadversions freely. 'Did you see how the sound of
his name frightened her?' he presently added. 'If you didn't, I did.
Zounds! what a future is in store for that poor little unfortunate wench
o' mine! I tell 'ee, Sue, 'twas not a marriage at all, in morality, and
if I were a woman in such a position, I shouldn't feel it as one. She
might, without a sign of sin, love a man of her choice as well now as if
she were chained up to no other at all. There, that's my mind, and I
can't help it. Ah, Sue, my man was best! He'd ha' suited her.'

'I don't believe it,' she replied incredulously.

'You should see him; then you would. He's growing up a fine fellow, I
can tell 'ee.'

'Hush! not so loud!' she answere