ed.

What a drive that must have been! Fulk had the advantage over Emily in
knowing what poor Mr. Dayman had told him, whereas she, poor child,
only knew that he had been so vilely served that she thought his
affection and esteem had been entirely killed.

They had it all out in that tax cart, a vehicle Fulk now regards as a
heavenly chariot, and I heard it all afterwards.

Poor Emily! she had grown a great deal older in those six years. At
eighteen she had implicitly believed in her mother. Mrs. Deerhurst had
been so good all those years of striving not to frighten my father,
that she had been perfection in her daughter's eyes. Emily had
believed with all her heart in her apparent disinterestedness, and her
hopes and sympathy for us were real; and so, when the crash really
came, and she told the poor girl with floods of tears that it was
impossible, and a thing not to be thought of, for a right-minded woman
to unite herself to a man of such birth. And poor Emily, with the
conscious ignorance of eighteen, believed, and was the sort of gentle
creature who could easily be daunted by the terror that her generous
impulses to share the shame and namelessness were unfeminine and wrong.
The utter silence had been the consequence of her mother assuring her,
with authority, that the true kindness was to betray no token of
feeling that could cherish hope where all was hopeless, and that he
would regret her less if she commanded herself and gave him no look.

It had been terrible, calm self-command, and obedience to abused filial
confidence in her mother's infallibility.

And then Mrs. Deerhurst had been sinking ever since in her daughter's
esteem, as Emily could not but rise higher from the conscientious
struggle and self-denying submission, and besides grew older and had
more experience; while Mrs. Deerhurst, no doubt, deteriorated in the
foreign wandering life, and all her motives made themselves evident
when she married the younger daughter.

Emily had thought for herself, and seen that advantage had been taken
of her innocence, and that her betrothed had rights, which, if she had
been older, she would not have been persuaded to ignore. But coming
home, two years later, and meeting my cold eyes and Fulk's ceremonious
bow, and hearing on all parts that he had accepted his position and had
a hard struggle to maintain his two sisters; she, knowing herself to be
portionless, could but suffer, and be still.

Of course