as
_Mrs. Compton_ only, no Honourable. That might attract attention, and
what we desire is to escape notice altogether, which I am sure is a
thing you will thoroughly understand, now that we have transplanted
ourselves so completely. Dear John, form the most favourable idea you
can of this sudden step, and come and see us as soon as it is possible.

"Yours affectly.,
"M. D."

To say that John was thunderstruck by this letter is to describe his
sensations mildly, for he was for a time bitterly angry, wounded,
disappointed, disturbed to the bottom of his soul; but perhaps if truth
were told it could scarcely be said that he disapproved. He thought it
over, which he naturally did all that day, to the great detriment of his
work, first with a sort of rage against Elinor and her impetuosity,
which presently shaded down into understanding of her feelings, and
ended in a sense that he might have known it from the first, and that
really no other conclusion was possible. He came gradually to acquiesce
in the step the ladies had taken. To have to explain everything to the
Hudsons, and Hills, and Mary Dales, to open up your most sacred heart in
order that they might be able to form a theory sufficient for their
outside purposes of your motives and methods, or, what was perhaps worse
still--to know that they were on the watch, guessing what you did not
tell them, putting things together, explaining this and that in their
own way--would have been intolerable. "That is the good of having
attached friends," John exclaimed to himself, very unjustly: for it is
human nature that is to blame, if there is any blame attaching to an
exercise of ingenuity so inevitable. As a matter of fact, when Miss Dale
brought the true or something like the true account to Windyhill, the
warmth of the sympathy for Elinor, the wrath of the whole community with
her unworthy husband, was almost impassioned. Had she been there it
would not have been possible for those good people altogether to conceal
from her how sorry and how indignant they were; even perhaps there might
have been some who could not have kept out of their eyes, who must have
betrayed in some word or shake of the head the "I told you so" which is
so dear to human nature. But how was it possible that they could remain
uninterested, unaffected by the trouble in the midst of them, or even
appear to be so? John, like Elinor, threw a fiery dart of impatience at
the country neighbours, not all