ly before her the prime
duties requisite in the mistress of such a family. He may have done
so.'

'I think not,' said Louis; 'it would be awkward when a woman fancied
she embraced poverty voluntarily for his sake. Poverty! It was riches
compared with their present condition. Isabel on 150 pounds a-year! It
may well make poor Jem ill to think about it! I only wonder it is not
a brain-fever!'

'Lord Fitzjocelyn regrets that brain-fever,' said Miss Faithfull.

'Probably my ideas on the subject are derived from the prevalence of
the complaint in light literature,' said Louis, smiling. 'It would be
more dignified, and suit Isabel better. Poor Isabel! I hope I have
done her injustice. She behaved gloriously at the barricades, and has
a great soul after all; but I had begun to think heroines not
calculated for moderate circumstances. May they do better in no
circumstances at all! Heighho! how a heavy heart makes one talk
nonsense! So I am to fetch the poor thing home, Miss Faithfull.'

This was determined on, whether with or without James's consent; Miss
Mercy undertaking that she and Martha would help Charlotte, and dispose
of the children in the House Beautiful; and she went back with Louis to
fetch them, when little Catharine was found peeping through the bars of
her prison-gate at the top of the nursery-stairs, shouting lustily for
papa. She graciously accepted her godfather as a substitute, and was
carried by him to her kind neighbour's house, already a supplementary
home. As to her father, Louis found him more refractory than ever.
His only greeting was, 'Why are not you gone home?' He scorned Mr.
Walby's prescriptions, and made such confident assertions that he
should be off to London in the evening, that Fitzjocelyn almost
reverted to the brain-fever theory, and did not venture to hint his
intention to any one but Charlotte, telling her that he should now
almost think her justified in locking the doors.

Sending information to his father, he started for Estminster, very
disconsolate, and full of self-reproach for the hasty proceedings which
had borne such bitter fruits. The man and the situation had been an
injustice to each other; a sensitive irritable person was the very last
to be fit for a position requiring unusual judgment and temper, where
his energy had preyed upon itself. His being placed there had been the
work of Louis's own impetuous scorn of the wisdom of elder and graver
heads. Suc