" added Mrs. Dennistoun, "I
wouldn't say anything to Pearson. If you've told him to be a dragon, let
him be a dragon still. I am sure you are right, and I will tell Elinor
so, and comfort her heart; but we may as well keep a good look out, and
our eyes about us, all the same."

"They are sure I am right, but think it better to go on as if I
were wrong," John said to himself as he went to dress for dinner.
And while he went through this ceremony, he had a great many
thoughts--half-impatient, half-tender--of the wonderful ways of women
which are so amazing to men in general, as the ways of men are amazing
to women, and will be so, no doubt, as long as the world goes on. The
strange mixture of the wise and the foolish, the altogether heroic,
and the involuntarily fictitious, struck his keen perception with
a humourous understanding, and amusement, and sympathy. That Mrs.
Dennistoun should pose a little as a sufferer while she was unmitigatedly
happy in the possession of Elinor and the child, and be abashed when
she was forced to confess how ecstatic was the fearful joy which she
snatched in the midst of danger, was strange enough. But that Elinor,
at this dreadful crisis of her life, when every bond was rent asunder,
and all that is ordinarily called happiness wrecked for ever, should be
moved to the kind of rapture he had seen in her face by the reaching out
and curling in of those little pink toes in the warm light of the fire,
was inconceivable--a thing that was not in any philosophy. She had made
shipwreck of her life. She had torn the man whom she loved out of her
heart, and fled from his neglect and treachery--a fugitive to her
mother's house. And yet as she sat before the fire with this little
infant cooing in the warmth--like a puppy or a little pig, or any
other little animal you can suggest--this was the thought of the
irreverent man--there was a look of almost more than common happiness,
of blessedness, in her face. Who can fathom these things? They were at
least beyond the knowledge, though not the sympathy, of this very rising
member of the bar.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Thus there came a sort of settling down and composure of affairs. Phil
Compton and all belonging to him disappeared from the scene, and Elinor
returned to all the habits of her old life--all the habits, with one
extraordinary and incalculable addition which changed all these habits.
The baby--so inconsiderable a little creature, not able to