n.
He had not been lately to Lynbrook, dreading the cold and damp of the
country in winter; and his sudden arrival had therefore an ominous
significance.

He came for an evening in mid-week, when even Blanche Carbury was
absent, and Bessy and Justine had the house to themselves. Mrs. Ansell
had sailed the week before with her invalid cousin. No farther words had
passed between herself and Justine--but the latter was conscious that
their talk had increased instead of lessened the distance between them.
Justine herself meant to leave soon. Her hope of regaining Bessy's
confidence had been deceived, and seeing herself definitely superseded,
she chafed anew at her purposeless inactivity. She had already written
to one or two doctors in New York, and to the matron of Saint
Elizabeth's. She had made herself a name in surgical cases, and it could
not be long before a summons came....

Meanwhile Mr. Tredegar arrived, and the three dined together, the two
women bending meekly to his discourse, which was never more oracular and
authoritative than when delivered to the gentler sex alone. Amherst's
absence, in particular, seemed to loose the thin current of Mr.
Tredegar's eloquence. He was never quite at ease in the presence of an
independent mind, and Justine often reflected that, even had the two men
known nothing of each other's views, there would have been between them
an instinctive and irreducible hostility--they would have disliked each
other if they had merely jostled elbows in the street.

Yet even freed from Amherst's presence Mr. Tredegar showed a darkling
brow, and as Justine slipped away after dinner she felt that she left
Bessy to something more serious than the usual business conference.

How serious, she was to learn that very night, when, in the small hours,
her friend burst in on her tearfully. Bessy was ruined--ruined--that was
what Mr. Tredegar had come to tell her! She might have known he would
not have travelled to Lynbrook for a trifle.... She had expected to find
herself cramped, restricted--to be warned that she must "manage,"
hateful word!... But this! This was incredible! Unendurable! There was
no money to build the gymnasium--none at all! And all because it had
been swallowed up at Westmore--because the ridiculous changes there,
the changes that nobody wanted, nobody approved of--that Truscomb and
all the other experts had opposed and derided from the first--these
changes, even modified and arrested,