peated
apart to Miss Wentworth with a troubled brow the fact that all they had
seen of Mr Wentworth in private they had liked very much; to which aunt
Cecilia answered, "Quite so," with her beautiful smile; while Miss
Leonora sat and listened, putting artful questions, and fixing the
heated Rector with that iron-grey eye, out of which the sparkle of
incipient light had not faded. Mr Morgan naturally said a great deal
more than he meant to say, and after it was said he was sorry; but he
did not show the latter sentiment except by silence and an uneasy
rustling about the room just before the Miss Wentworths rose to go--a
sign apparent to his wife, though to nobody else. He gave Miss Wentworth
his arm to the door with an embarrassed courtesy. "If you are going to
stay any time at Carlingford, I trust we shall see more of you," said Mr
Morgan: "I ought to beg your pardon for taking up so much time with my
affairs;" and the Rector was much taken aback when Miss Wentworth
answered, "Thank you, that is just what I was thinking." He went back to
his troubled wife in great perplexity. What was it that was just what
she was thinking?--that he would see more of them, or that he had spoken
too much of his own affairs?

"You think I have been angry and made an idiot of myself," said Mr
Morgan to his wife, who was standing looking from a safe distance
through the curtains at the three ladies, who were holding a consultation
with their servant out of the window of the solemn chariot provided by
the Blue Boar, as to where they were to go next.

"Nonsense, dear; but I wish you had not said quite so much about Mr
Wentworth," said the Rector's wife, seizing, with female art, on a cause
for her annoyance which would not wound her Welshman's _amour propre_,
"for I rather think he is dependent on his aunts. They have the living
of Skelmersdale, I know; and I remember now that their nephew was to
have had it. I hope this won't turn them against him, dear," said Mrs
Morgan, who did not care the least in the world about Skelmersdale,
looking anxiously in her husband's face.

This was the climax of the Rector's trouble. "Why did not you tell me
that before?" he said, with conjugal injustice, and went off to his
study with a disturbed mind, thinking that perhaps he had injured his
own chances of getting rid of the Perpetual Curate. If Mrs Morgan had
permitted herself to soliloquise after he was gone, the matter of her
thoughts might have been