foolish." He had a trick of repeating himself, conceiving, no doubt,
that the commonplace achieves distinction by repetition.

Hortensia sat in an arm-chair by the window, and sighed, looking out
over the downs. "Do I not know it?" she cried, and the eyes which were
averted from his lordship were charred with tears--tears of hot anger,
shame and mortification. "God help all women!" she added bitterly, after
a moment, as many another woman under similar and worse circumstances
has cried before and since.

A more feeling man might have conceived that this was a moment in which
to leave her to herself and her own thoughts, and in that it is possible
that a more feeling man had been mistaken. Ostermore, stolid and
unimaginative, but not altogether without sympathy for his ward, of whom
he was reasonably fond--as fond, no doubt, as it was his capacity to be
for any other than himself--approached her and set a plump hand upon the
back of her chair.

"What was it drove you to this?"

She turned upon him almost fiercely. "My Lady Ostermore," she answered
him.

His lordship frowned, and his eyes shifted uneasily from her face. In
his heart he disliked his wife excessively, disliked her because she was
the one person in the world who governed him, who rode rough-shod over
his feelings and desires; because, perhaps, she was the mother of his
unfeeling, detestable son. She may not have been the only person living
to despise Lord Ostermore; but she was certainly the only one with the
courage to manifest her contempt, and that in no circumscribed terms.
And yet, disliking her as he did, returning with interest her contempt
of him, he veiled it, and was loyal to his termagant, never suffering
himself to utter a complaint of her to others, never suffering others to
censure her within his hearing. This loyalty may have had its roots in
pride--indeed, no other soil can be assigned to them--a pride that would
allow no strangers to pry into the sore places of his being. He frowned
now to hear Hortensia's angry mention of her ladyship's name; and if his
blue eyes moved uneasily under his beetling brows, it was because the
situation irked him. How should he stand as judge between Mistress
Winthrop--towards whom, as we have seen, he had a kindness--and his
wife, whom he hated, yet towards whom he would not be disloyal?

He wished the subject dropped, since, did he ask the obvious
question--in what my Lady Ostermore could have been the