that no
impromptu deliveries were required of him in the marriage-service.

Mrs. Doria had her own reasons for being in a hurry. She had discovered
something of the strange impassive nature of her child; not from any
confession of Clare's, but from signs a mother can read when, her eyes
are not resolutely shut. She saw with alarm and anguish that Clare had
fallen into the pit she had been digging for her so laboriously. In vain
she entreated the baronet to break the disgraceful, and, as she said,
illegal alliance his son had contracted. Sir Austin would not even stop
the little pension to poor Berry. "At least you will do that, Austin,"
she begged pathetically. "You will show your sense of that horrid
woman's conduct?" He refused to offer up any victim to console her. Then
Mrs. Doria told him her thoughts,--and when an outraged energetic lady
is finally brought to exhibit these painfully hoarded treasures,
she does not use half words as a medium. His System, and his conduct
generally were denounced to him, without analysis. She let him
understand that the world laughed at him; and he heard this from her
at a time when his mask was still soft and liable to be acted on by his
nerves. "You are weak, Austin! weak, I tell you!" she said, and, like
all angry and self-interested people, prophecy came easy to her. In her
heart she accused him of her own fault, in imputing to him the wreck of
her project. The baronet allowed her to revel in the proclamation of a
dire future, and quietly counselled her to keep apart from him, which
his sister assured him she would do.

But to be passive in calamity is the province of no woman. Mark the
race at any hour. "What revolution and hubbub does not that little
instrument, the needle, avert from us!" says The Pilgrim's Scrip. Alas,
that in calamity women cannot stitch! Now that she saw Clare wanted
other than iron, it struck her she must have a husband, and be made
secure as a woman and a wife. This seemed the thing to do: and, as she
had forced the iron down Clare's throat, so she forced the husband, and
Clare gulped at the latter as she had at the former. On the very day
that Mrs. Doria had this new track shaped out before her, John Todhunter
called at the Foreys'. "Old John!" sang out Mrs. Doria, "show him up to
me. I want to see him particularly." He sat with her alone. He was a
man multitudes of women would have married--whom will they not?--and who
would have married any presentabl