o
on seeing him after this!"

She had been talking helplessly enough before; her tone was little more
broken now. "Not--not even--see him?"

"How could you?" George cried. "Mother, it seems to me that if he ever
set foot in this house again--oh! I can't speak of it! Could you see
him, knowing what talk it makes every time he turns into this street,
and knowing what that means to me? Oh, I don't understand all this--I
don't! If you'd told me, a year ago, that such things were going to
happen, I'd have thought you were insane--and now I believe I am!"

Then, after a preliminary gesture of despair, as though he meant harm to
the ceiling, he flung himself heavily, face downward, upon the bed. His
anguish was none the less real for its vehemence; and the stricken lady
came to him instantly and bent over him, once more enfolding him in her
arms. She said nothing, but suddenly her tears fell upon his head; she
saw them, and seemed to be startled.

"Oh, this won't do!" she said. "I've never let you see me cry before,
except when your father died. I mustn't!"

And she ran from the room.

...A little while after she had gone, George rose and began solemnly to
dress for dinner. At one stage of these conscientious proceedings he put
on, temporarily, his long black velvet dressing-gown, and, happening
to catch sight in his pier glass of the picturesque and medieval
figure thus presented, he paused to regard it; and something profoundly
theatrical in his nature came to the surface.

His lips moved; he whispered, half-aloud, some famous fragments:

"Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn
black..."

For, in truth, the mirrored princely image, with hair dishevelled on the
white brow, and the long tragic fall of black velvet from the shoulders,
had brought about (in his thought at least) some comparisons of his own
times, so out of joint, with those of that other gentle prince and heir
whose widowed mother was minded to marry again.

"But I have that within which passeth show; These but the trappings and
the suits of Woe."

Not less like Hamlet did he feel and look as he sat gauntly at the
dinner table with Fanny to partake of a meal throughout which neither
spoke. Isabel had sent word "not to wait" for her, an injunction it was
as well they obeyed, for she did not come at all. But with the renewal
of sustenance furnished to his system, some relaxation must have
occurred within the high-stru