Page:Terminations (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1895).djvu/135

Rh not the question of her marriage that had brought her back. I greatly enjoyed this discovery, and was sure that, had that question alone been involved, she would have remained away. In this case, doubtless, Gravener would, in spite of the House of Commons, have found means to rejoin her. It afterward made me uncomfortable for her that, alone in the lodging Mrs. Mulville had put before me as dreary, she should have in any degree the air of waiting for her fate; so that I was presently relieved at hearing of her having gone to stay at Coldfield. If she was in England at all while the engagement stood, the only proper place for her was under Lady Maddock's wing. Now that she was unfortunate and relatively poor, perhaps her prospective sister-in-law would be wholly won over. There would be much to say, if I had space, about the way her behavior, as I caught gleams of it, ministered to the image that had taken birth in my mind, to my private amusement, as I listened to George Gravener in the railway-carriage. I watched her in the light of this queer possibility—a formidable thing certainly to meet—and I was aware that it colored, extravagantly perhaps, my interpretation of her very looks and tones. At Wimbledon, for instance, it had seemed to me that she was literally afraid of Saltram; in dread of a coercion that she had begun already to feel. I had come up to town with her the next day and had been convinced that, though deeply interested, she was immensely on her guard. She