ng and he turned a little redder than before. There were several
ways in which his sister-in-law often wished he had been very different,
but she had never disliked him for a certain boyish shyness that was in
him, which came out in his dealings with almost all women. The governess
of his children made him uncomfortable and Laura had already noticed
that he had the same effect upon Miss Steet. He was fond of his
children, but he saw them hardly more frequently than their mother and
they never knew whether he were at home or away. Indeed his goings and
comings were so frequent that Laura herself scarcely knew: it was an
accident that on this occasion his absence had been marked for her.
Selina had had her reasons for wishing not to go up to town while her
husband was still at Mellows, and she cherished the irritating belief
that he stayed at home on purpose to watch her--to keep her from going
away. It was her theory that she herself was perpetually at home--that
few women were more domestic, more glued to the fireside and absorbed in
the duties belonging to it; and unreasonable as she was she recognised
the fact that for her to establish this theory she must make her
husband sometimes see her at Mellows. It was not enough for her to
maintain that he would see her if he were sometimes there himself.
Therefore she disliked to be caught in the crude fact of absence--to go
away under his nose; what she preferred was to take the next train after
his own and return an hour or two before him. She managed this often
with great ability, in spite of her not being able to be sure when he
_would_ return. Of late however she had ceased to take so much trouble,
and Laura, by no desire of the girl's own, was enough in the confidence
of her impatiences and perversities to know that for her to have wished
(four days before the moment I write of) to put him on a wrong scent--or
to keep him at least off the right one--she must have had something more
dreadful than usual in her head. This was why the girl had been so
nervous and why the sense of an impending catastrophe, which had lately
gathered strength in her mind, was at present almost intolerably
pressing: she knew how little Selina could afford to be more dreadful
than usual.

Lionel startled her by turning up in that unexpected way, though she
could not have told herself when it would have been natural to expect
him. This attitude, at Mellows, was left to the servants, most of them