airing.

The round of the red winter sun was behind the bare Kensington
chestnuts, when these two parties met. Happily for Lucy and the hope
she bore in her bosom, she was perversely admiring a fair horsewoman
galloping by at the moment. Mrs. Berry plucked at her gown once or
twice, to prepare her eyes for the shock, but Lucy's head was still half
averted, and thinks Mrs. Berry, "Twon't hurt her if she go into his
arms head foremost." They were close; Mrs. Berry performed the bob
preliminary. Richard held her silent with a terrible face; he grasped
her arm, and put her behind him. Other people intervened. Lucy saw
nothing to account for Berry's excessive flutter. Berry threw it on the
air and some breakfast bacon, which, she said, she knew in the morning
while she ate it, was bad for the bile, and which probably was the cause
of her bursting into tears, much to Lucy's astonishment.

"What you ate makes you cry, Mrs. Berry?"

"It's all--" Mrs. Berry pressed at her heart and leaned sideways,
"it's all stomach, my dear. Don't ye mind," and becoming aware of her
unfashionable behaviour, she trailed off to the shelter of the elms.

"You have a singular manner with old ladies," said Sir Austin to his
son, after Berry had been swept aside.

Scarcely courteous. She behaved like a mad woman, certainly."--Are you
ill, my son?"

Richard was death-pale, his strong form smitten through with weakness.
The baronet sought Adrian's eye. Adrian had seen Lucy as they passed,
and he had a glimpse of Richard's countenance while disposing of Berry.
Had Lucy recognized them, he would have gone to her unhesitatingly.
As she did not, he thought it well, under the circumstances, to leave
matters as they were. He answered the baronet's look with a shrug.

"Are you ill, Richard?" Sir Austin again asked his son.

"Come on, sir! come on!" cried Richard.

His father's further meditations, as they stepped briskly to the
Foreys', gave poor ferry a character which one who lectures on
matrimony, and has kissed but three men in her life, shrieks to hear the
very title of.

"Richard will go to his wife to-morrow," Sir Austin said to Adrian some
time before they went in to dinner.

Adrian asked him if he had chanced to see a young fair-haired lady by
the side of the old one Richard had treated so peculiarly; and to the
baronet's acknowledgment that he remembered to have observed such a
person, Adrian said: "That was his wife, sir."

Sir Aust