tain wilfulness. We see and understand; we see and won't
understand.

"Tell me why you passed by her as you did this afternoon," he said
gravely: and in the same voice Richard answered: "I passed her because I
could not do otherwise."

"Your wife, Richard?"

"Yes! my wife!"

"If she had seen you, Richard?"

"God spared her that!"

Mrs. Doria, bustling in practical haste, and bearing Richard's hat and
greatcoat in her energetic hands, came between them at this juncture.
Dimples of commiseration were in her cheeks while she kissed her
brother's perplexed forehead. She forgot her trouble about Clare,
deploring his fatuity.

Sir Austin was forced to let his son depart. As of old, he took counsel
with Adrian, and the wise youth was soothing. "Somebody has kissed him,
sir, and the chaste boy can't get over it." This absurd suggestion did
more to appease the baronet than if Adrian had given a veritable
reasonable key to Richard's conduct. It set him thinking that it might be
a prudish strain in the young man's mind, due to the System in
difficulties.

"I may have been wrong in one thing," he said, with an air of the utmost
doubt of it. "I, perhaps, was wrong in allowing him so much liberty
during his probation."

Adrian pointed out to him that he had distinctly commanded it.

"Yes, yes; that is on me."

His was an order of mind that would accept the most burdensome charges,
and by some species of moral usury make a profit out of them.

Clare was little talked of. Adrian attributed the employment of the
telegraph to John Todhunter's uxorious distress at a toothache, or
possibly the first symptoms of an heir to his house.

"That child's mind has disease in it... She is not sound," said the
baronet.

On the door-step of the hotel, when they returned, stood Mrs. Berry. Her
wish to speak a few words with the baronet reverentially communicated,
she was ushered upstairs into his room.

Mrs. Berry compressed her person in the chair she was beckoned to occupy.

"Well' ma'am, you have something to say," observed the baronet, for she
seemed loth to commence.

"Wishin' I hadn't--" Mrs. Berry took him up, and mindful of the good rule
to begin at the beginning, pursued: "I dare say, Sir Austin, you don't
remember me, and I little thought when last we parted our meeting 'd be
like this. Twenty year don't go over one without showin' it, no more than
twenty ox. It's a might o' time,--twenty year! Leastways not quite
twe