n the Monday morning he received a letter from
home which made it necessary--or induced him to suppose it to be
necessary--that he should go home to Clavering, at any rate for one day.
This he did on the Monday, sending a line to Mrs. Burton to say whither
he was gone, and that he should be back by Wednesday night or Thursday
morning--and imploring her to give his love to Florence, if she would
venture to do so. Mrs. Burton would know what must be his first business
in London on his return, and she might be sure he would come or send to
Onslow Crescent as soon as that was over.

Harry's letter--the former and longer letter, Cecilia had read over,
till she nearly knew it by heart, before her husband's return. She well
understood that he would be very hard upon Harry. He had been inclined
to forgive Clavering for what had been remiss--to forgive the silence,
the absence from the office, and the want of courtesy to his wife, till
Harry had confessed his sin--but he could not endure that his sister
should seek the hand of a man who had declared himself to be in doubt
whether he would take it, or that any one should seek it for her, in her
ignorance of all the truth. His wife, on the other hand, simply looked
to Florence's comfort and happiness. That Florence should not suffer the
pang of having been deceived and rejected was all in all to Cecilia. "Of
course she must know it some day," the wife had pleaded to her husband.
"He is not the man to keep anything secret. But if she is told when he
has returned to her, and is good to her, the happiness of the return
will cure the other misery." But Burton would not submit to this. "To be
comfortable at present is not everything," he said. "If the man be so
miserably weak that he does not even now know his own mind, Florence had
better take her punishment, and be quit of him."

Cecilia had narrated to him with passable fidelity what had occurred
upstairs, while he was sitting alone in the dining-room. That she in her
anger had at one moment spurned Harry Clavering, and that in the next
she had knelt to him, imploring him to come back to Florence--those two
little incidents she did not tell to her husband. Harry's adventures
with Lady Ongar, as far as she knew them, she described accurately. "I
can't make any apology for him; upon my life I can't," said Burton. "If
I know what it is for a man to behave ill, falsely, like a knave in such
matters, he is so behaving." So Theodore Burto