as quite intent upon her charitable mission. Mr
Wentworth's confidence was justified.

CHAPTER XXXV.

Mr Wentworth's day had been closely occupied up to this point. He had
gone through a great many emotions, and transacted a good deal of
business, and he went home with the comparative ease of a man whose
anxieties are relieved, not by any real deliverance, but by the
soothing influence of fatigue and the sense of something accomplished.
He was not in reality in a better position than when he left his house
in the morning, bitterly mortified, injured, and wounded at the
tenderest point. Things were very much the same as they had been, but
a change had come over the feelings of the Perpetual Curate. He
remembered with a smile, as he went down Grange Lane, that Mr Proctor
was to dine with him, and that he had rashly undertaken to have
something better than a chop. It was a very foolish engagement under
the circumstances. Mr Wentworth was cogitating within himself whether
he could make an appeal to the sympathies of his aunt's cook for
something worthy of the sensitive palate of a Fellow of All-Souls,
when all such thoughts were suddenly driven out of his mind by the
apparition of his brother Gerald--perhaps the last man in the world
whom he could have expected to see in Carlingford. Gerald was coming
up Grange Lane in his meditative way from Mrs Hadwin's door. To look
at him was enough to reveal to any clear-sighted spectator the
presence of some perpetual argument in his mind. Though he had come
out to look for Frank, his eyes were continually forsaking his
intention, catching spots of lichen on the wall and clumps of herbage
on the roadside. The long discussion had become so familiar to him,
that even now, when his mind was made up, he could not relinquish the
habit which possessed him. When he perceived Frank, he quickened his
steps. They met with only such a modified expression of surprise on
the part of the younger brother as was natural to a meeting of English
kinsfolk. "I heard Louisa's voice in my aunt's drawing-room," said
Frank; "but, oddly enough, it never occurred to me that you might have
come with her;" and then Gerald turned with the Curate. When the
ordinary family questions were asked and answered, a silence ensued
between the two. As for Frank, in the multiplicity of his own cares,
he had all but forgotten his brother; and Gerald's mind, though full
of anxiety, had something of the calm which mi