is his sister to fall
back on. My child! see what I have been doing. I have been calculating
here." Georgiana took a scroll from her desk, and laid it under Emilia's
eyes. "I have reckoned our expenses as far as Turin, and have only
consented to take Lady Gosstre's valet for courier, just to please her. I
know that he will make the cost double, and I feel like a miser about
money. If Merthyr is ruined, he will require every farthing that I have
for our common subsistence. Now do you understand? I can hardly put the
case more plainly. It is out of my power to do what you ask me to do."

Emilia sighed lightly, and seemed not much cast down by the refusal. She
perceived that it was necessarily positive, and like all minds framed to
resolve to action, there was an instantaneous change of the current of
her thoughts in another direction.

"Then, my darling, my one prayer!" she said. "Postpone our going for a
week. I will try to get help for them elsewhere."

Georgiana was pleased by Emilia's manner of taking the rebuff; but it
required an altercation before she consented to this postponement; she
nodded her head finally in anger.

CHAPTER LVII

By the park-gates that evening, Wilfrid received a letter from the hands
of Tracy Runningbrook. It said: "I am not able to see you now. When I
tell you that I will see you before I leave England, I insist upon your
believing me. I have no head for seeing anybody now. Emilia"--was the
simple signature, perused over and over again by this maddened lover,
under the flitting gate-lamp, after Tracy had left him. The coldness of
Emilia's name so briefly given, concentrated every fire in his heart.
What was it but miserable cowardice, he thought, that prevented him from
getting the peace poor Barrett had found? Intolerable anguish weakened
his limbs. He flung himself on a wayside bank, grovelling, to rise again
calm and quite ready for society, upon the proper application of the
clothes-brush. Indeed; he patted his shoulder and elbow to remove the
soil of his short contact with earth, and tried a cigar: but the first
taste of the smoke sickened his lips. Then he stood for a moment as a man
in a new world. This strange sensation of disgust with familiar
comforting habits, fixed him in perplexity, till a rushing of wild
thoughts and hopes from brain to heart, heart to brain, gave him insight,
and he perceived his state, and that for all he held to in our life he
was dependent upon a