his lady for many moments. He said:

'It might have been better for Dorothy if the Countess had taken her. She
is so wealthy in comparison with ourselves, and could have ushered the
girl into the great world more effectually than we ever shall be able to
do.'

'The Contessa take Dorothy?' said Lady Mottisfont with a start. 'What--was
she the lady who wished to adopt her?'

'Yes; she was staying at Bath when Lawyer Gayton wrote to me.'

'But how do you know all this, Ashley?'

He showed a little hesitation. 'Oh, I've seen her,' he says. 'You know,
she drives to the meet sometimes, though she does not ride; and she has
informed me that she was the lady who inquired of Gayton.'

'You have talked to her as well as seen her, then?'

'Oh yes, several times; everybody has.'

'Why didn't you tell me?' says his lady. 'I had quite forgotten to call
upon her. I'll go to-morrow, or soon . . . But I can't think, Ashley,
how you can say that it might have been better for Dorothy to have gone
to her; she is so much our own now that I cannot admit any such
conjectures as those, even in jest.' Her eyes reproached him so
eloquently that Sir Ashley Mottisfont did not answer.

Lady Mottisfont did not hunt any more than the Anglo-Italian Countess
did; indeed, she had become so absorbed in household matters and in
Dorothy's wellbeing that she had no mind to waste a minute on mere
enjoyments. As she had said, to talk coolly of what might have been the
best destination in days past for a child to whom they had become so
attached seemed quite barbarous, and she could not understand how her
husband should consider the point so abstractedly; for, as will probably
have been guessed, Lady Mottisfont long before this time, if she had not
done so at the very beginning, divined Sir Ashley's true relation to
Dorothy. But the baronet's wife was so discreetly meek and mild that she
never told him of her surmise, and took what Heaven had sent her without
cavil, her generosity in this respect having been bountifully rewarded by
the new life she found in her love for the little girl.

Her husband recurred to the same uncomfortable subject when, a few days
later, they were speaking of travelling abroad. He said that it was
almost a pity, if they thought of going, that they had not fallen in with
the Countess's wish. That lady had told him that she had met Dorothy
walking with her nurse, and that she had never seen a child she liked so