at he
remained there, he knew not how long, standing on the very spot on
which she had left him; and that at last there grew upon him almost a
fear of moving, a dread lest he should be heard, an inordinate desire
to escape without the sound of a footfall, without the clicking of
a lock. Everything in that house had been offered to him. He had
refused it all, and then felt that of all human beings under the
sun none had so little right to be standing there as he. His very
presence in that drawing-room was an insult to the woman whom he had
driven from it.

But at length he was in the street, and had found his way across
Piccadilly into the Green Park. Then, as soon as he could find a spot
apart from the Sunday world, he threw himself upon the turf; and
tried to fix his thoughts upon the thing that he had done. His first
feeling, I think, was one of pure and unmixed disappointment;--of
disappointment so bitter, that even the vision of his own Mary did
not tend to comfort him. How great might have been his success, and
how terrible was his failure! Had he taken the woman's hand and her
money, had he clenched his grasp on the great prize offered to him,
his misery would have been ten times worse the first moment that he
would have been away from her. Then, indeed,--it being so that he
was a man with a heart within his breast,--there would have been no
comfort for him, in his outlooks on any side. But even now, when he
had done right,--knowing well that he had done right,--he found that
comfort did not come readily within his reach.

CHAPTER LXXIII

Amantium Irae

Miss Effingham's life at this time was not the happiest in the world.
Her lines, as she once said to her friend Lady Laura, were not
laid for her in pleasant places. Her residence was still with her
aunt, and she had come to find that it was almost impossible any
longer to endure Lady Baldock, and quite impossible to escape from
Lady Baldock. In former days she had had a dream that she might
escape, and live alone if she chose to be alone; that she might be
independent in her life, as a man is independent, if she chose to
live after that fashion; that she might take her own fortune in her
own hand, as the law certainly allowed her to do, and act with it as
she might please. But latterly she had learned to understand that all
this was not possible for her. Though one law allowed it, another law
disallowed it, and the latter law was at least as powerful