huge collective life,
carried on out of doors, strays among scattered objects even as a
summer air idles in a lonely garden. Our friend looked about and
hesitated; observed, on the evidence of a table charged with purchases
and other matters, that Sarah had become possessed--by no aid from
HIM--of the last number of the salmon-coloured Revue; noted further
that Mamie appeared to have received a present of Fromentin's "Maitres
d'Autrefois" from Chad, who had written her name on the cover; and
pulled up at the sight of a heavy letter addressed in a hand he knew.
This letter, forwarded by a banker and arriving in Mrs. Pocock's
absence, had been placed in evidence, and it drew from the fact of its
being unopened a sudden queer power to intensify the reach of its
author. It brought home to him the scale on which Mrs. Newsome--for
she had been copious indeed this time--was writing to her daughter
while she kept HIM in durance; and it had altogether such an effect
upon him as made him for a few minutes stand still and breathe low. In
his own room, at his own hotel, he had dozens of well-filled envelopes
superscribed in that character; and there was actually something in the
renewal of his interrupted vision of the character that played straight
into the so frequent question of whether he weren't already
disinherited beyond appeal. It was such an assurance as the sharp
downstrokes of her pen hadn't yet had occasion to give him; but they
somehow at the present crisis stood for a probable absoluteness in any
decree of the writer. He looked at Sarah's name and address, in short,
as if he had been looking hard into her mother's face, and then turned
from it as if the face had declined to relax. But since it was in a
manner as if Mrs. Newsome were thereby all the more, instead of the
less, in the room, and were conscious, sharply and sorely conscious, of
himself, so he felt both held and hushed, summoned to stay at least and
take his punishment. By staying, accordingly, he took it--creeping
softly and vaguely about and waiting for Sarah to come in. She WOULD
come in if he stayed long enough, and he had now more than ever the
sense of her success in leaving him a prey to anxiety. It wasn't to be
denied that she had had a happy instinct, from the point of view of
Woollett, in placing him thus at the mercy of her own initiative. It
was very well to try to say he didn't care--that she might break ground
when she would, might nev