es, and settled themselves for a while at Lugano. And here the
news reached them of the marriage of George Hotspur.

Lady Elizabeth read the marriage among the advertisements in the
_Times_, and at once took it to Sir Harry, withdrawing the paper from
the room in a manner which made Emily sure that there was something
in it which she was not intended to see. But Sir Harry thought that
the news should be told to her, and he himself told it.

"Already married!" she said. "And who is the lady?"

"You had better not ask, my dear."

"Why not ask? I may, at any rate, know her name."

"Mrs. Morton. She was a widow,--and an actress."

"Oh yes, I know," said Emily, blushing; for in those days in which
it had been sought to wean her from George Hotspur, a word or two
about this lady had been said to her by Lady Elizabeth under the
instructions of Sir Harry. And there was no more said on that
occasion. On that day, and on the following, her father observed no
change in her; and the mother spoke nothing of her fears. But on
the next morning Lady Elizabeth said that she was not as she had
been. "She is thinking of him still--always," she whispered to her
husband. He made no reply, but sat alone, out in the garden, with his
newspaper before him, reading nothing, but cursing that cousin of his
in his heart.

There could be no miracle now for her! Even the thought of that was
gone. The man who had made her believe that he loved her, only in the
last autumn,--though indeed it seemed to her that years had rolled
over since, and made her old, worn-out, and weary;--who had asked for
and obtained the one gift she had to give, the bestowal of her very
self; who had made her in her baby folly believe that he was almost
divine, whereas he was hardly human in his lowness,--this man, whom
she still loved in a way which she could not herself understand,
loving and despising him utterly at the same time,--was now the
husband of another woman. Even he, she had felt, would have thought
something of her. But she had been nothing to him but the means of
escape from disreputable difficulties. She could not sustain her
contempt for herself as she remembered this, and yet she showed but
little of it in her outward manner.

"I'll go when you like, Papa," she said when the days of May had
come, "but I'd sooner stay here a little longer if you wouldn't
mind." There was no talk of going home. It was only a question
whether they should go further no