I'm down here, mother; she loves her sister, and I
must learn where her sister's to be found. One of those gentlemen up at
Fairly's the guilty man. I don't say which; perhaps I don't know. But
oh, what a lot of lightnings I see in the back of my head!"

Robert fell back on the pillow. Mrs. Boulby wiped her eyes. Her feelings
were overwhelmed with mournful devotion to the passionate young man; and
she expressed them practically: "A rump-steak would never digest in his
poor stomach!"

He seemed to be of that opinion too, for when, after lying till eleven,
he rose and appeared at the breakfast-table, he ate nothing but crumbs
of dry bread. It was curious to see his precise attention to the
neatness of his hat and coat, and the nervous eye he cast upon the
clock, while brushing and accurately fixing these garments. The hat
would not sit as he was accustomed to have it, owing to the bruise on
his head, and he stood like a woman petulant with her milliner before
the glass; now pressing the hat down till the pain was insufferable, and
again trying whether it presented him acceptably in the enforced style
of his wearing it. He persisted in this, till Mrs. Boulby's exclamation
of wonder admonished him of the ideas received by other eyes than his
own. When we appear most incongruous, we are often exposing the key to
our characters; and how much his vanity, wounded by Rhoda, had to do
with his proceedings down at Warbeach, it were unfair to measure just
yet, lest his finer qualities be cast into shade, but to what degree it
affected him will be seen.

Mrs. Boulby's persuasions induced him to take a stout silver-topped
walking-stick of her husband's, a relic shaped from the wood of the
Royal George; leaning upon which rather more like a Naval pensioner than
he would have cared to know, he went forth to his appointment with the
lady.

CHAPTER XX

The park-sward of Fairly, white with snow, rolled down in long sweeps to
the salt water: and under the last sloping oak of the park there was
a gorse-bushed lane, green in Summer, but now bearing cumbrous
blossom--like burdens of the crisp snow-fall. Mrs. Lovell sat on
horseback here, and alone, with her gauntleted hand at her waist,
charmingly habited in tone with the landscape. She expected a cavalier,
and did not perceive the approach of a pedestrian, but bowed quietly
when Robert lifted his hat.

"They say you are mad. You see, I trust myself to you."

"I wish I could th