rred. 'Am I a
prisoner?' she said.

'Yes, Hester; yes. If you will use such a word as to your father's
house, you are a prisoner.'

'I will not remain so. You will have to chain me, and to gag me, and to
kill me. Oh, my baby,--oh, my child! Nurse, nurse, bring me my boy.'
Then with her baby in her arms, she sat down in another high-backed oak
armchair, looking at the hall-door. There she would sit till her husband
should come. He surely would come. He would make his way up to those
windows, and there she could at any rate hear his commands. If he came
for her, surely she would be able to escape.

The coachman drove back to the town very quickly, and went to the inn at
which his horses were generally put up, thinking it better to go to his
master thence on foot. But there he found John Caldigate, who had come
across from Mr. Seely's office. 'Where is Mrs. Caldigate?' he said, as
the man drove the empty carriage down the entrance to the yard. The man,
touching his hat, and with a motion of his hand which was intended to
check his master's impetuosity, drove on; and then, when he had freed
himself from the charge of his horses, told his story with many
whispers.

'The gardener said she wasn't to come!'

'Just that, sir. There's something up more than you think, sir; there is
indeed. He was that fractious that he wouldn't hold the hosses for me,
not for a minute, till I could go in and see, and then------'

'Well?'

'The gates was chained, sir.'

'Chained?'

'A chain was round the bars, and a padlock. I never see such a thing on
a gentleman's gate in my life before. Chained; as nobody wasn't to go
in, nor yet nobody wasn't to come out!' The man as he said this wore
that air of dignity which is always imparted by the possession of great
tidings the truth of which will certainly not be doubted.

The tidings were great. The very thing which his father had suggested,
and which he had declared to be impossible, was being done. The old
banker himself would not, he thought, have dared to propose and carry
out such a project. The whole Bolton family had conspired together to
keep his wife from him, and had allured her away by the false promise of
a friendly visit! He knew, too, that the law was on his side; but he
knew also that he might find it very difficult to make use of the law.
If the world of Cambridge chose to think that Hester was not his wife,
the world of Cambridge would probably support the Boltons by their