ock might be found an escape
from one of their great family difficulties.

"You had better take this, papa," Mrs. Trevelyan had said, when she
received from the office of Mr. Bideawhile a cheque payable to her
order for the money sent to her by her husband's direction.

"I do not want the man's money," said Sir Marmaduke.

"But you are going to this place for my sake, papa;--and it is right
that he should bear the expense for his own wife. And, papa, you must
remember always that though his mind is distracted on this horrible
business, he is not a bad man. No one is more liberal or more just
about money." Sir Marmaduke's feelings on the matter were very
much the same as those which had troubled Mr. Outhouse, and he,
personally, refused to touch the money; but his daughter paid her own
share of the expenses of the journey.

They travelled at their ease, stopping at Paris, and at Geneva, and
at Milan. Lady Rowley thought that she was taken very fast, because
she was allowed to sleep only two nights at each of these places,
and Sir Rowley himself thought that he had achieved something of a
Hannibalian enterprise in taking five ladies and two maids over the
Simplon and down into the plains of Lombardy, with nobody to protect
him but a single courier. He had been a little nervous about it,
being unaccustomed to European travelling, and had not at first
realised the fact that the journey is to be made with less trouble
than one from the Marble Arch to Mile End. "My dears," he said to his
younger daughters, as they were rattling round the steep downward
twists and turns of the great road, "you must sit quite still on
these descents, or you do not know where you may go. The least thing
would overset us." But Lucy and Sophy soon knew better, and became
so intimate with the mountain, under the friendly guidance of their
courier, that before the plains were reached, they were in and out,
and here and there, and up and down, as though they had been bred
among the valleys of the pass. There would come a ringing laugh from
some rock above their head, and Lady Rowley looking up would see
their dresses fluttering on a pinnacle which appeared to her to be
fit only for a bird; and there would be the courier behind them, with
two parasols, and a shawl, and a cloak, and an eye-glass, and a fine
pair of grizzled whiskers. They made an Alpine club of their own,
refusing to admit their father because he would not climb up a rock,
and Nor