could long continue to submit herself to the caprices of a
man so unreasonable and dictatorial as he to whom she had just been
listening. Were it not for the boy, there would, she felt, be no
doubt upon the matter. And now, as matters stood, she thought that
it should be their great object to regain possession of the child.
Then she endeavoured to calculate what would be the result to her
daughter, if in very truth it should be found that the wretched
man was mad. To hope for such a result seemed to her to be very
wicked;--and yet she hardly knew how not to hope for it.

"Well, mamma," said Emily Trevelyan, with a faint attempt at a smile,
"you saw him?"

"Yes, dearest, I saw him. I can only say that he is a most
unreasonable man."

"And he would tell you nothing of Louey?"

"No dear,--not a word."

CHAPTER LXIII.

SIR MARMADUKE AT HOME.

Nora Rowley had told her lover that there was to be no further
communication between them till her father and mother should be
in England; but in telling him so, had so frankly confessed her
own affection for him and had so sturdily promised to be true to
him, that no lover could have been reasonably aggrieved by such an
interdiction. Nora was quite conscious of this, and was aware that
Hugh Stanbury had received such encouragement as ought at any rate to
bring him to the new Rowley establishment, as soon as he should learn
where it had fixed itself. But when at the end of ten days he had
not shown himself, she began to feel doubts. Could it be that he had
changed his mind, that he was unwilling to encounter refusal from her
father, or that he had found, on looking into his own affairs more
closely, that it would be absurd for him to propose to take a wife to
himself while his means were so poor and so precarious? Sir Marmaduke
during this time had been so unhappy, so fretful, so indignant,
and so much worried, that Nora herself had become almost afraid of
him; and, without much reasoning on the matter, had taught herself
to believe that Hugh might be actuated by similar fears. She had
intended to tell her mother of what had occurred between her and
Stanbury the first moment that she and Lady Rowley were together; but
then there had fallen upon them that terrible incident of the loss
of the child, and the whole family had become at once so wrapped up
in the agony of the bereaved mother, and so full of rage against the
unreasonable father, that there seemed to Nora to