uch
inflammable materials, and take fire at a civil word. So ill, poor
thing! Now, Robert, on your honour, has not the mother been working on
you?'

'I tell you not what the mother told me, but what the medical man said.
Low nervous fever set in long ago, and she has never recovered her
confinement. Heat and closeness were already destroying her, when my
disclosure that you were not abroad, as she had been led to believe,
brought on fainting, and almost immediate delirium. This was last
evening, she was worse this morning.'

'Poor girl, poor girl!' muttered Owen, his face almost convulsed with
emotion. 'There was no helping it. She would have drowned herself if I
had not taken her with me--quite capable of it! after those intolerable
women at Wrapworth had opened fire. I wish women's tongues were cut out
by act of parliament. So, Phoebe, tell poor Honor that I know I am
unpardonable, but I am sincerely sorry for her. I fell into it, there's
no knowing how, and she would pity me, and so would you, if you knew what
I have gone through. Good-bye, Phoebe. Most likely I shall never see
you again. Won't you shake hands, and tell me you are sorry for me?'

'I should be, if you seemed more sorry for your wife than yourself,' she
said, holding out her hand, but by no means prepared for his not only
pressing it with fervour, but carrying it to his lips.

Then, as Robert started forward with an impulse of snatching her from
him, he almost threw it from his grasp, and with a long sigh very like
bitter regret, and a murmur that resembled 'That's a little angel,' he
mounted the bank. Robert only tarried to say, 'May I be able to bear
with him! Phoebe, do your best for poor Miss Charlecote. I will write.'

Phoebe sat down at the foot of a tree, veiled by the waving ferns, to
take breath and understand what had passed. Her first act was to strike
one hand across the other, as though to obliterate the kiss, then to draw
off her glove, and drop it in the deepest of the fern, never to be worn
again. Hateful! With that poor neglected wife pining to death in those
stifling city streets, to be making sport in those forest glades. Shame!
shame! But oh! worst of all was his patronizing pity for Miss
Charlecote! Phoebe's own mission to Miss Charlecote was dreadful enough,
and she could have sat for hours deliberating on the mode of carrying
grief and dismay to her friend, who had looked so joyous and exulting
with her