with you."

"I'll tell everybody what a villain you are; I will, indeed--a
villain and a poor weak silly fool. She was too good for you; that's
what she was." Crosbie, as Lady Julia was addressing to him the last
words, hurried upstairs away from her, but her ladyship, standing on
a landing-place, spoke up loudly, so that no word should be lost on
her retreating enemy.

"We positively must get rid of that woman," the countess, who heard
it all, said to Margaretta. "She is disturbing the house and
disgracing herself every day."

"She went to papa this morning, mamma."

"She did not get much by that move," said the countess.

On the following morning Crosbie returned to town, but just before he
left the castle he received a third letter from Lily Dale. "I have
been rather disappointed at not hearing this morning," said Lily,
"for I thought the postman would have brought me a letter. But I know
you'll be a better boy when you get back to London, and I won't scold
you. Scold you, indeed! No; I'll never scold you, not though I
shouldn't hear for a month."

He would have given all that he had in the world, three times told,
if he could have blotted out that visit to Courcy Castle from the
past facts of his existence.

CHAPTER XXV

Adolphus Crosbie Spends an Evening at His Club

Crosbie, as he was being driven from the castle to the nearest
station, in a dog-cart hired from the hotel, could not keep himself
from thinking of that other morning, not yet a fortnight past, on
which he had left Allington; and as he thought of it he knew that
he was a villain. On this morning Alexandrina had not come out from
the house to watch his departure, and catch the last glance of his
receding figure. As he had not started very early she had sat with
him at the breakfast-table; but others also had sat there, and when
he got up to go, she did no more than smile softly and give him her
hand. It had been already settled that he was to spend his Christmas
at Courcy; as it had been also settled that he was to spend it at
Allington.

Lady Amelia was, of all the family, the most affectionate to him, and
perhaps of them all she was the one whose affection was worth the
most. She was not a woman endowed with a very high mind or with very
noble feelings. She had begun life trusting to the nobility of her
blood for everything, and declaring somewhat loudly among her friends
that her father's rank and her mother's birth imposed on