Salutary Mount (this was the name of the ex-Mayor's residence)
personal disappointment left no leisure for lamenting the prospects of
Conservatism. Mr. Mumbray shut himself up in the room known as his
"study." Mrs. Mumbray stormed at her servants, wrangled with her
children, and from her husband held apart in sour contempt--feeble,
pompous creature that he was! With such an opportunity, and unable to
make use of it! But for _her_, he would never even have become Mayor.
She was enraged at having yielded in the matter of Serena's betrothal.
Glazzard had fooled them; he was an unprincipled adventurer, with an
eye only to the fortune Serena would bring him!

"If you marry that man," she asseverated, _a propos_ of a discussion
with her daughter on a carpet which had worn badly, "I shall have
nothing whatever to do with the affair--nothing!"

Serena drew apart and kept silence.

"You hear what I say? You understand me?"

"You mean that you won't be present at the wedding?"

"I do!" cried her mother, careless what she said so long as it sounded
emphatic. "You shall take all the responsibility. If you like to throw
yourself away on a bald-headed, dissipated man--as I _know_ he is--it
shall be entirely your own doing. I wash my hands of it--and that's the
last word you will hear from me on the subject."

In consequence of which assertion she vilified Glazzard and Serena for
three-quarters of an hour, until her daughter, who had sat in
abstraction, slowly rose and withdrew.

Alone in her bedroom, Serena shed many tears, as she had often done of
late. The poor girl was miserably uncertain how to act. She foresaw
that home would be less than ever a home to her after this accumulation
of troubles, and indeed she had made up her mind to leave it, but
whether as a wife or as an independent woman she could not decide. "On
her own responsibility"--yes, that was the one thing certain. And what
experience had she whereon to form a judgment? It might be that her
mother's arraignment of Glazzard was grounded in truth, but how could
she determine one way or the other? On the whole, she liked him better
than when she promised to marry him--yes, she liked him better; she did
rot shrink from the thought of wedlock with him. He was a highly
educated and clever man; he offered her a prospect of fuller life than
she had yet imagined; perhaps it was a choice between him and the
ordinary husband such as fell to Polterham girls. Yet again, if