go. Poor fellow! it was low fever, but
quite as much want of luck, I shall always believe,' she said.

'Oh, I am sorry! He was so kind to me!' said Alice, squeezing her
hand, and looking up with sweet tender commiseration.

'There, there, don't, you pretty creature!' said Mrs. Houghton, putting
her hand across her eyes. 'I declare, you've almost made me cry--which
I've not done--well, hardly, since I parted with you at Dieppe,
thinking you a sweet little flower plucked and thrown away to die,
though I had done my best to bind it to him. What care I took not to
let Houghton disabuse him about Jersey marriages!'

There is a difference between hearing and hearkening, and Alice
Egremont's loving and unsuspecting heart was so entirely closed against
evil thoughts of her husband, and so fully occupied with her old
friend's condition, that she never took in the signification of all
this, while Nuttie, being essentially of a far more shrewd and less
confiding nature, and already imbued with extreme distrust of her
father, was taking in all these revelations with an open-eyed, silent
horror of conviction that her old impressions of the likeness to
Marmion or Theseus had been perfectly correct. It was all under her
hat, however, and the elder ladies never thought of her, Alice bringing
back the conversation to Mrs. Houghton herself. 'Oh, my dear, I drag
on as I can. I've got a fragment of our old income, and when that's
run too low, I go up to Monte Carlo--I always had the lucky hand, you
know, and 'tis only restitution after all! I'm sick of it all though,
and sometimes think I'll take my good sister Anne's offers and go home.'

'Oh do, do!' cried Alice.

'But,' went on the poor woman, 'humble pie goes against me, and think
what an amount would be before me--heigh ho!--after nearly
five-and-twenty years; yes, five-and-twenty years it is--since
Houghton, poor fellow, told me I was too bright and winsome for a
little country lawyer's house in a poky street. What would they think
of me now?' and she laughed with a sound that was painful to hear.
'Well, Sycorax had done one good deed, and when I look at you, queening
it there, I feel that so have I.'

'You were very good to me, I know; but oh, if you would go home to your
sister!'

'My dear, you little know what you ask! Anne! Why, she is the prime
district lady, or whatever you call it, of Dockforth. Think what it
would be to her to have this battered old vaurie