work. Good-bye."

She left the room, as abruptly as she had entered it. With her firm
heavy step she descended to the hall, passed out at the house door, and
closed it behind her--never to return to it again.

CHAPTER 6

Amelius left Mrs. Farnaby, troubled by emotions of confusion and alarm,
which he was the last man living to endure patiently. Her extraordinary
story of the discovered daughter, the still more startling assertion of
her solution to leave the house, the absence of any plain explanation,
the burden of secrecy imposed on him--all combined together to irritate
his sensitive nerves. "I hate mysteries," he thought; "and ever since I
landed in England, I seem fated to be mixed up in them. Does she really
mean to leave her husband and her niece? What will Farnaby do? What will
become of Regina?"

To think of Regina was to think of the new repulse of which he had been
made the subject. Again he had appealed to her love for him, and again
she had refused to marry him at his own time.

He was especially perplexed and angry, when he reflected on the
unassailably strong influence which her uncle appeared to have over her.
All Regina's sympathy was with Mr. Farnaby and his troubles. Amelius
might have understood her a little better, if she had told him what
had passed between her uncle and herself on the night of Mr. Farnaby's
return, in a state of indignation, from the lecture. In terror of the
engagement being broken off, she had been forced to confess that she
was too fond of Amelius to prevail on herself to part with him. If
he attempted a second exposition of his Socialist principles on the
platform, she owned that it might be impossible to receive him again as
a suitor. But she pleaded hard for the granting of a pardon to the first
offence, in the interests of her own tranquillity, if not in mercy to
Amelius. Mr. Farnaby, already troubled by his commercial anxieties,
had listened more amiably, and also more absently, than usual; and had
granted her petition with the ready indulgence of a preoccupied man. It
had been decided between them that the offence of the lecture should be
passed over in discreet silence. Regina's gratitude for this concession
inspired her sympathy with her uncle in his present state of suspense.
She had been sorely tempted to tell Amelius what had happened. But the
natural reserve of her character--fortified, in this instance, by the
defensive pride which makes a woman unwilling