Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/645

Rh restored intact, or whether, as things blew over, any one would ever ask her out again—the only two questions of the least importance to her at present. She was tired bodily; heart-sick of everything in heaven and earth; rather sorry, on the whole, to find herself back at the Dene; more relieved to find she was not to go to Ashcot; and the bedroom they had put her into was warm and comfortable; and the only form remorse ever took in her was self-pity; and it was not in her nature to trouble herself about the sufferings of others. What was there to keep Dora Lawrence awake?

So went by the first day; so, with little variation, went by a good many weeks. Then the neighbors ceased to send inquiries ostensibly about Mrs. Hilliard's health. The invalid, after a time, came down to the drawing-room; the blinds were drawn up; the servants left off speaking to each other in whispers, and the household, after a constrained, awkward fashion, went back to its old life.

I believe a place left vacant by death could scarcely cast gloom more utter upon a fireside than a place unexpectedly refilled by such a return as Mrs. Lawrence's. What was to be talked about? The irrevocable past? the shame-covered present? the clouded future? Mrs. Hilliard, as time wore on, ceased to sermonize Dora openly; but every one of her languid movements, as she lay, her handkerchief to her eyes, on the sofa, every good book she opened (was this a time she said, sternly, for novel reading?) every remark she made to her husband or to Katharine was, in itself, a sermon. The Squire never sermonized; never spoke an upbraiding word to Dot on the subject of her disgrace, but he knew that the disgrace—bruited, who shall say how? about the country—was matter of common talk, and felt it keenly—lost heart in hunting, hardly liked to be seen about in the parish, excused himself two Mondays running from attending vestry-meetings, grew moody and querulous by his own fireside. A more sharply-defined, albeit a greater, misfortune he might have borne up against. But to have a niece at one's hearth who had run away, yet not run away; whose husband was indisputably justified in discarding her, yet whose relations were bound, more indisputably still, to uphold her, was so out-of-the-way a calamity, so manifest an upsetting of natural law, as to cut the Squire hopelessly adrift from his old anchorage.

"If really there was any place," he would say, in moments of expansion, to Katharine—"somewhere where she could go, just for a time, till people have left off talking, and till your mother gets stronger! I don't repent one bit of having brought her home, poor thing, and I wouldn't like her to be harshly treated. Still, if there was any place!"

In which persons who have gone astray could quietly disappear, was what Mr. Hilliard meant; not be sermonized, poor souls! or bullied in any way—only disappear! If there were some blessed, innocuous process by which the results of wrong-doing—disgrace to relations, above all—could be wiped out, and the world go on, pleasantly and respectably, as it did before!

Not an uncommon kind of wish, even among people of superior intellect to Mr. Hilliard's!

place of earthly redemption was discovered; no mysterious city of refuge to which poor Theodosia's child could be removed for the remission of her sins. But by the time the Spring evenings were lengthening visibly, the chestnut buds