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 and doubt. She hoped in another fortnight to see and judge for herself; but Mr. Trevor and she were summoned into Sussex by the sudden death of his father; and ten days after Helen's marriage Lord and Lady Eskdale sat down, for the first time during the last ten years, to a tête-à-tête dinner. Poor dear people, it fairly puzzled them. They were more attached to each other than many husbands and wives are after twenty-four years of married life; and they had been in the daily habit of taking a comfortable half-hour's talk in Lord Eskdale's library, uninterrupted by any of their children. But they had never contemplated the possibility of dining and passing the whole evening together, without a child to come in to dessert, or a daughter to look at and listen to. Then who was to make breakfast the next morning, and to answer notes, and to receive visitors? Lady Eskdale was quite posed. She actually ordered a riding-habit, and declared she would begin riding again with Lord Eskdale, who hated going out alone, and had always been accompanied by one of his children. Then she thought she could rub up music enough to play to him after dinner; but when the evening came she was fast asleep on the sofa, half dead with the fatigue of her morning ride, and she almost cried when a note was brought to her that required an answer—partly because, as she said and thought, she missed Helen so much, and partly because she was too indolent to sit up to write.

"I don't think I can ever exist in this way, Lord Eskdale," she said. "What is to be done? here is this note to be answered."

"Give it to me, Jane; I will be your secretary."

"Thank you, that is very good of you. It is a great relief for this once; but how am I to get on when you are out? To be sure, that poor dear Lord Walden might as well have put off dying just for a month, and then the