arts should go back to the parsonage after
lunch, and she had persisted in her intention after it had been
settled that the Merediths were to stay over that evening. Lady
Meredith now advised her friend to carry out this determination
without saying anything about her husband's terrible iniquities, and
then to send the letter up to Lady Lufton as soon as she reached the
parsonage. "Mamma will never know that you received it here," said
Lady Meredith. But Mrs. Robarts would not consent to this. Such a
course seemed to her to be cowardly. She knew that her husband was
doing wrong; she felt that he knew it himself; but still it was
necessary that she should defend him. However terrible might be the
storm, it must break upon her own head. So she at once went up and
tapped at Lady Lufton's private door; and as she did so Lady Meredith
followed her.

"Come in," said Lady Lufton, and the voice did not sound soft and
pleasant. When they entered, they found her sitting at her little
writing-table, with her head resting on her arm, and that letter
which she had received that morning was lying open on the table
before her. Indeed there were two letters now there, one from a
London lawyer to herself, and the other from her son to that London
lawyer. It needs only be explained that the subject of those letters
was the immediate sale of that outlying portion of the Lufton
property in Oxfordshire, as to which Mr. Sowerby once spoke. Lord
Lufton had told the lawyer that the thing must be done at once,
adding that his friend Robarts would have explained the whole affair
to his mother. And then the lawyer had written to Lady Lufton, as
indeed was necessary; but unfortunately Lady Lufton had not hitherto
heard a word of the matter. In her eyes the sale of family property
was horrible; the fact that a young man with some fifteen or twenty
thousand a year should require subsidiary money was horrible; that
her own son should have not written to her himself was horrible;
and it was also horrible that her own pet, the clergyman whom she
had brought there to be her son's friend, should be mixed up in the
matter; should be cognizant of it while she was not cognizant; should
be employed in it as a go-between and agent in her son's bad courses.
It was all horrible, and Lady Lufton was sitting there with a black
brow and an uneasy heart. As regarded our poor parson, we may say
that in this matter he was blameless, except that he had hitherto
lack