Hannah/Chapter 13

Lady Dunsmore was a shrewd and far-seeing woman. She responded with the utmost civility to all Miss Bertha Rivers's advances, and planned no end of gayeties for her and Hannah, from which the Rivers family might plainly see—and she meant them to see—that she desired her friend Miss Thelluson's visit to be made as pleasant as possible.

But fate and Hannah's own will stood in the way. Adeline declined more rapidly than any one expected; and it soon became evident that she was never likely to quit those dull lodgings in Harley Street, except to be taken back to Easterham in the one peaceful way—as, however far off they died, it had always been the custom to carry home all the Riverses. Even Adeline herself seemed to understand this.

"I don't want to stir from here; it is too much trouble," she said one day to Hannah, now daily beside her. "But, afterward, tell them they may take me home. Not to the Grange—that never was home—but to the Moat House. Let them have me one night in the drawing-room there before they put me under the daisies. And let Bernard read the service over me. And—you may tell him and ​them all that I was not sorry to die—I did not mind it—I felt so tired!"

Nevertheless

and that breast was, for Adeline, not her husband's, but Hannah's. Of any one else's nursing she testified such impatience—perhaps feeling instinctively that it was given more out of duty than love—that gradually both Mr. Melville and Bertha let her have her own way. Things ended in Miss Thelluson's spending most of her time, not in the Dunsmores' lively mansion, but in that dull drawing-room, from whence, except to her bedroom, Adeline was never moved.

"Do stay with her as much as you can," entreated Bernard, who ran up for a day to London as often as he could, but who still saw no more than brothers usually see-the mere outside of his sister's life. He knew she was doomed; but then the doctors had said Adeline was consumptive, and not likely to live to be old. "And she has had a happy life, married to a good fellow whom she was always fond of. Poor Adeline! And she has grown so much attached to you, Hannah. She says you are such a comfort to her!"

"I think I have rather a faculty for comforting sick people: perhaps because doing so comforts me."

But Hannah did not say—where was the use of saying?—that this comfort was to her not unneeded. The uncertainty of her present position; the daily self-suppression it entailed; nay, the daily hypocrisy—or what to her honest nature felt like such—were so painful that sometimes when Bernard appeared she did not know whether she were glad or sorry to see him. But every body else-even to the Dunsmores—seemed heartily glad. And no one seemed to have the slightest suspicion of any bond between Rosie's aunt and Rosie's father except little Rosie. Sometimes this was to her a relief—sometimes an inexpressible pain.

"Good-by, and God bless you for all your goodness to ​my sister," said Bernard one Saturday as he was going back to Easterham. "They will bless you one of these days," added he, tenderly—all he could say, for he and she were not alone. They seldom were alone now. Opportunities were so difficult to make; and when made, the fear of being broken in upon in their tête-à-têtes caused them to feel awkward and uncomfortable—at least Hannah did.

"Good-by," she responded, with a sad, inward smile at the phrase "one of these days." Did it mean when they should be married? But that day might never come, or come when they were quite elderly people, and hope deferred had drained their hearts dry of all but the merest dregs of love. And the picture of the woman who might have been Bernard's wife, happy and honored, accepted by his family, welcomed by his neighbors, reigning joyfully at the House on the Hill, and finally succeeding to the Moat House, to be there all that a Lady Rivers should be—presented itself bitterly to Hannah's imagination. She had taken from him the chance of all this, and more, and given him in return—what? A poor, weary heart, which, though it was bursting with love, could not utter more than that cold "good-by."

But when she had said it and returned to Adeline's bedside, Hannah forgot the troubles of life in the solemnity of fast advancing death.

"It is hard Bernard is obliged to go," the sick girl said, pitifully. "He likes to sit with me a little, I can see that. They do not, and therefore I don't want to have them. Besides, I can't have one of them without having both; and I won't have both. Nobody could expect it."

"No," said Hannah, feeling sorrowfully that it was useless to argue against what had grown almost into a monomania, though the poor sick girl had still self-control enough not to betray herself, except in incidental, half-intelligible words like these. Better leave it thus, and let her sorrow die with her—one of the heart-wounds which nobody avenges; one of the thefts for which nobody is punished.

​At length, just in the middle of the London season, when, one summer morning, Mayfair lay in the passing lull between the closing of operas and theatres, and the breaking up of late balls, a cab thundered up to the Earl of Dunsmore's door. It was Mr. Melville coming to fetch Miss Thelluson to his wife. She was dying.

And then Hannah found out that the young man had some feeling. Full of strength and health himself, he had never really believed in Adeline's illness, still less her approaching death, till now, and it came upon him with a shock indescribable. Overwhelmed with grief, and something not unlike remorse, during the twelve hours she still lingered he never quitted her side. Careless as he had been to his living wife, to a wife really dying he was the tenderest husband in the world. So much so that she once turned to Hannah with a piteous face:

"Oh, if this could only last! Couldn't you make me well again?"

But she could not be made well again; and it might not have lasted, this late happiness which gave her peace in dying. Poor Adeline! it was better to die! And when Hannah watched the big fellow, now utterly subdued by the emotion of the hour, insist upon feeding his wife with every mouthful of her last food as tenderly as if she were a baby—sit supporting her on the bed, motionless for hours, till his limbs were all cramped and stiff—sadder than ever seemed the blind folly, perhaps begun in a mistake on both sides, which had ended in letting a poor heart first starve for love, and then grow poisoned with a nameless jealousy, until between the hunger and the poison it died.

For Adeline did die; but her death was peaceful, and it was in her husband's arms.

"He is fond of me, after all, you see," she whispered to Hannah in one of Herbert's momentary absences. "It was very foolish of me to be so jealous of Bertha. Perhaps I should not, had it been a thing I could have spoken about. And don't speak of it now, please. Only, if he ​ever wants to do as his father did, and the law will allow it, tell him he may as well marry Bertha as any body: I shall not mind."

But to Bertha herself, although she kissed her in token of amity and farewell, Adeline said not a word. The secret wound, vainly plastered over, seemed to bleed even though she was dying.

Her end had come so suddenly at last that no one from Easterham had been sent for; and when Bernard arrived next morning at his accustomed hour, it was to find a shut-up house, and his sister "away." Then, in the shock of his first grief, Hannah found out, as she had never done before, how close, even with all their faults, was the tie which bound him to his own people. It touched her deeply; it made her love him better, and honor him more; and yet it frightened her. For there might come a time when he had to choose, deliberately and decisively, between the love of kindred and the love of her; and she foresaw now more clearly than ever how hard the struggle would be.

In the absorption of her close attendance upon Adeline she had heard little of what was going on in the outside world. Even "the bill"—the constant subject of discussion at Dunsmore House—had faded out of her mind, till such phrases as "read the first time," "read the second time," "very satisfactory majority," and so on, met her ear. Once they would have been mere meaningless forms of speech; now she listened intently, and tried hard to understand. She did understand so far as to learn that there was every probability this session of the bill's passing the Commons, and being carried up to the House of Lords, where, upon a certain night, a certain number of noblemen, some biased one way or other by party motives, and a proportion voting quite carelessly, without any strong feeling at all in the matter, would decide her happiness and Bernard's for life.

It was a crisis so hard, a suspense so terrible, that perhaps it was as well this grief came to dull it a little. Not entirely. Even amidst his sorrow for his sister, Hannah ​could detect a nervous restlessness in Mr. Rivers's every movement; and every day, too, he sought eagerly for the newspaper, and often his hands actually trembled as he took it up, and turned at once to the parliamentary notices. But he never said one word to Hannah, nor she to him; indeed, this time they were never alone at all.

Adeline was to be buried at home, and Mr. Melville begged that Hannah would accompany Bertha, and take her place, with his wife's sisters and his own, at the funeral. Lady Rivers, in a note, asked the same, adding a cordial invitation that she should stay at the Moat House. Hannah looked at Bernard.

"Yes, go," he said; "I wish it. They are very grateful to you for your goodness to her. And I want you," he continued, in a low tone, "to try to be one of us—which you may be before very long."

This was all; but Hannah felt forced to obey, even though it cost her the first parting from her child. Only a three days' parting, however, and Bernard seemed so glad that she should go.

She, too, as she sat with the other three mourners—one in each corner of the silent railway-carriage—and watched the soft rain falling on the fields and reddening hedges, under which, here and there, appeared a dot of yellow, an early primrose, she was conscious in her heart of a throb of hope responding to the pulses of the spring; and once, suddenly looking up at Bernard, she fancied he felt it too. It was nature, human nature; and human passion, suppressed but never crushed, waking out of its long sleep, and crying unto God to bless it with a little happiness, even as he blesses the reviving earth with the beauty of the spring.

Miss Thelluson's welcome at the Moat House, mournful as it was, was kind; for they had all been touched by her kindness to the dead, and sorrow strikes the tenderest chord in every heart. She had never liked Bernard's people so well, or been drawn to them so much, as during that quiet evening when poor Adeline's coffin rested a ​night under the Moat House roof, or the day after, when, with all the family, she followed it to its last resting-place.

It was a curious sensation. To stand as one of them—these Riverses, whom she loved not, at best merely liked—well aware how little they had ever liked her, and how ignorant they were of the tie which bound her to them. Guiltless as she knew herself to be, she was not without a painful feeling of deception, that jarred terribly upon her proud and candid spirit. She scarcely said a word to Bernard, until he whispered, "Do speak to me now and then, or they will think it so strange." But even then her words were formal and few.

She had meant to leave on the third day, for she yearned to be back with her darling; but fate came between. Sir Austin, long an invalid, and almost a nonentity in the family, passed, the night after his daughter's funeral, suddenly and unawares, into the silent dignity of death. When Hannah came down next morning it was to find the Moat House plunged once more into that decent, decorous affliction which was all that could be expected of them under the circumstances.

They begged her to stay a little longer, and she staid. There was a good deal to be done, and the ladies soon found out how well Miss Thelluson could do it. Also, not being a relative, she could see the visitors, and retail to the family the wide-spread sympathy expressed for it at Easterham, and for many miles round. "You are such a comfort to us," they said; and Bernard, whom his father's death seemed to affect more deeply than Hannah had expected, said, in his entreating eyes, "You are such a comfort to me." So what could she do but stay?

A few days more, and the Rivers vault was again opened; and Miss Thelluson stood beside it, with all the Rivers family except the new Sir Austin, of whom nobody spoke except the Easterham lawyer, who lamented confidentially to Hannah that Mr. Rivers should be kept out of his title, though it could not be for more than a few years The hapless elder brother, whose mind grew weaker and ​weaker every day, though his body was strong enough, might at any time have some fit that would carry him off, and prevent his being an incumbrance longer.

"And then," whispered the lawyer, "Mr. Rivers will be Sir Bernard; and what a fine position he will hold!—one of the finest in the county. What a pity he has no heir!—only an heiress. But of course he will now marry immediately. Indeed, he owes it to his family."

Hannah listened, as she was now learning to listen—teaching her poor, mobile, conscious face the hardness of marble: her heart, too, if possible; for these torments, so far from lessening, would increase day by day. How should she ever bear them? She sometimes did not know.

The family had just come out of the study, where the will had been read, and were settling down to that strange quiet evening known in most households, when, the dead having been taken away and buried out of sight, the living, with an awful sense of relief as well as of loss, try to return to their old ways—eat, drink, and talk as usual. But it was in vain; and after a silent dinner Bernard went back to the examination of papers in the study. Thence he presently sent a message for help.

"I suppose that means Miss Thelluson," said Bertha, with a half laugh, which Lady Rivers gravely extinguished.

"Go, my dear. I dare say your brother-in-law finds you more useful to him than any one else." So Hannah went.

Bernard was sitting—his head in his hands. It was a white, woe-begone face that he lifted up to Hannah.

"Thank you for coming. I thought perhaps you might. I wanted comfort."

Hannah said a few commonplace but gentle words.

"Oh no, it is not that. I am not sorry my poor old father is away. It was his time to go. And for me, there will be one less to fight against, one less to wound."

He said the latter words half inaudibly—evidently not ​meaning her to hear; but she did, at least some of them. A wild, bitter answer came to her lips, but this was not the time to utter it. She merely replied by an offer of help, and sat down to fulfill it. He showed her what to do, and they went on working silently together for nearly half an hour.

But the extremes of human emotion are not so far apart as they seem. Keen and real as the young man's grief was, he was a young man still, and when the woman he loved sat beside him, with her sweet, grave look, and her calm, still manner, another passion than grief began to stir within him.

"Hannah," he cried, seizing her hand, "are you happy, or miserable—as I am? or, which seems most likely, have you no feeling at all?"

She looked up. It was not a face of stone.

"Put your work away—what does it matter? Talk to me, Hannah. Think how long it is since you and I have had a quiet word together."

"Can I help that?"

"No—nor I. We are both of us victims—tied and bound victims in the hands of fate. Sometimes I think she will get the better of us, and we shall both perish miserably."

"That is a very melancholy view to take of things," said Hannah, half smiling. "Let us hope it is not quite true."

"My bright, brave-hearted woman! If I had you always beside me, I should not go down. It is being alone that sinks a man to despair. Still, suspense is very hard."

And then he told her what she had not been before aware of—that the bill had safely passed the House of Commons; that Lord Dunsmore and other peers, a rather strong party, hoped even in the House of Lords, which had hitherto always thrown it out, to get this year a sufficient majority to carry it through and make it the law of the land.

"And then, Hannah, we can be married—married immediately."

​He gasped rather than uttered the words. Passion resisted had conquered him with double force.

"But—your own people?"

"They like you now—appreciate you, even as Lady Dunsmore does." (He did not see, and Hannah had not the heart to suggest, that perhaps it was in consequence of that appreciation.) "Besides, whether or not, they must consent. They can not go against me. My father has left every thing in my hands. I am, to all intents and purposes, the head of the family. It is that which makes me so anxious. Should the bill not pass— But it shall pass!" he cried, impetuously, "and then no power on earth shall prevent me from marrying the woman I choose—and that is you!"

"Strange, strange!" murmured Hannah, half to herself, and dropped her conscious face, and felt more like a girl than she had done for many years. For she had no duties to think of; her child was away, there was only her lover beside her. Her lover, wooing her with a reality of love, a persistent earnestness, that no woman could either question or mistake.

"You are not quite colorless, I see, my white lily. You will not always shrink back when I want to take you to my heart? You will creep in there some day, and make it feel warm again, instead of cold and empty and lonely, as it is now. Hannah, how soon, supposing the bill passes this month—how soon will you let me marry you?"

They were standing together by the fire, and Bernard had just put his arm round her. She turned toward him; she could not help it; it was so sweet to be thus loved. Hand in hand and eye to eye they stood for the moment, yielding to present joy and future hope, absorbed in one another, thinking of nothing beyond themselves, seeing and hearing nothing—when the door opened, and Lady Rivers stood right in front of them.

"Good Heavens!" she exclaimed, and started back as if she had trod on a snake.

They started back too—these guilty-innocent lovers. ​Instinctively they separated from one another; and then Bernard recovered himself.

Vexatious as the crisis was—though he looked as if he would have cut off his hand rather than have had it happen—still, now that it had happened, he was too much of a man not to meet it, too much of a gentleman not to know how to meet it decorously. He moved back again to Hannah's side and took her hand.

"Well, Lady Rivers, had you any thing to say to me?"

"Well, Bernard Rivers, and what have you to say for yourself? And what has this—this young woman—to say for herself, I should like to know?"

"If you mean Miss Thelluson, her answer is as brief as my own must be. It is now many months since she promised to be my wife as soon as our marriage can be lawfully carried out. In the mean time we are friends—close friends; and, as you may have observed, we also consider ourselves engaged lovers.—Hannah, do not distress yourself; there is no need."

And in the face of his step-mother he put his protecting arm round her—she was trembling violently—and drew her head on his shoulder.

There are some people whom to master you must take by storm. Hold your own, and they will let you have it, perhaps even respect you the more; but show the slightest symptom of weakness, and they will trample you into the dust. Bernard knew perfectly well with whom he had to deal, and took his measures accordingly.

Lady Rivers, utterly astounded, less perhaps by the fact itself than by the cool way in which Bernard had taken its discovery, simply stood and stared.

"I never knew any thing so dreadful; never in all my life. Excuse my intrusion. The only thing I can do is to leave you immediately."

She turned and quitted the room, shutting the door after her. Then, left alone with him, Hannah sobbed out her bitter humiliation upon Bernard's breast.

He comforted her as well as he could, saying that this ​must have happened some day; perhaps it was as well it. should happen now; and that he did not much care. Still it was evident he did care; that he was considerably annoyed.

"Of course it increases our perplexities much; for our secret is no longer our own. In her wrath and indignation she will blab it out to the whole community, unless, indeed, family pride ties her tongue. But, anyhow, we can not help ourselves; we must brave it out. Come with me, Hannah."

"Where?"

"Into the next room, to face them all and tell the exact truth. Otherwise we may be overburdened with any quantity of lies. Come, my dear one. You are not afraid?"

"No." She had had all along a vague doubt that when it came to the point he would be ashamed of her and of his love for her. To find that he was not gave Hannah such comfort that she felt as if she could have walked barefoot over red-hot plowshares, like some slandered woman of the Middle Ages, if only she might find at the end of her terrible march Bernard's face looking at her as it looked now.

"Yes," she said, "I will come with you at once; for what is told must be told quickly. I can not stay another night in this house."

"You must, I fear," answered Bernard, gently. "Where would you go to? Not to mine?"

"Oh no, no; I can never go to your house any more."

And the cruel penalties of their position, the chains which bound them on all sides, began to be felt by both in a manner neither had ever felt before. To Hannah it seemed as if she were actually treading between those fiery plowshares, and she could not have steadied her steps but for Bernard's supporting hand.

She held to him, literally with the clinging grasp of a child, as they passed across the hall to where, in the fine old drawing-room, like a conclave of the Inquisition, the whole family were assembled.

​Lady Rivers had evidently been explaining what she had just heard and seen. Astonishment was upon every face, and but for one accidental circumstance—the presence of Herbert Melville—there might have been a stronger feeling yet. But indecorum being the greatest dread, and prudence the principal characteristic, of the Riverses, they were obliged to restrain their wrath within the natural limits of an offended family which has just discovered that one of its members has made a matrimonial engagement without telling them any thing about it. Even Lady Rivers, with her widowed son-in-law standing by, was forced more than once to pause and alter her form of speech, dilating more on the wicked secrecy with which Bernard had planned his marriage than the sort of marriage he was about to make.

When the two culprits walked in, looking agitated enough, but still not exactly like culprits, she stopped.

"Let them speak for themselves, if they have the face to do it," cried she, dropping down in her chair, exhausted with vituperation. And then his sisters rushed to Bernard—some angry, some in tears—asking him how he could ever think of doing such a dreadful thing; with his father not yet cold in his grave—their poor, poor father, who would have shuddered at the thought of such a marriage.

It was a hard strait for a man to be in. That he felt it as acutely as so tender a heart could possibly feel was plain. He turned deadly pale; but still he never let go of Hannah's hand. She—for a moment she thought of breaking from him, and flying out of the house—anywhere—to the world's end—that she might save him from her and her fatal love. Then a wise resolution came—the determination, since he had chosen her, to stand by him to the last. By her child, too, for one implied both. Thinking of little Rosie, she was strong again, for no sense of guilt enfeebled her; all she was conscious of was misery—pure misery; and that was at least bearable. She sat down in the chair where Bernard had placed her, still ​holding him fast by the hand; the only being she had to hold to in the wide world now.

"Sisters," said he at last, speaking very quietly, but as firmly as he could, "what your mother has just found out I intended to have kept back from you till the law made my marriage possible. I knew how you would feel about it—as I felt myself once; but people's minds change."

"So it appears," said Lady Rivers, with a loud sneer. "Especially after living in the same house together—for months and months."

"Especially after living in the same house together, as you say," repeated Bernard, deliberately, though his cheek flamed furiously. "Living in a relation close enough to give us every opportunity of finding out one another's character, and of wishing the tie should be made closer still. I did not love her at first; not for a long time; but once loving her, I love her forever. What I do, I beg you all to understand, is done not hastily, but deliberately. Long before I ever said a word otherwise than brotherly to Miss Thelluson, or she had any suspicion of what my feelings were, my mind was made up. I shall marry her if I can, believing that, both for my own sake and my child's, it is the wisest second marriage I could make—and the most natural."

"Marry her! after living together as brother and sister—or whatever you choose to call it," cried Mrs. Morecamb. "Thomas, dear, did you ever hear of any thing so shocking—so improper?"

"The law did not hold it improper," answered Bernard, in extreme irritation. "And, as I tell you, at first we had no idea of such a thing. It came upon me unawares. The law should not have placed me in such a position. But it will be broken soon, I trust. And until then you may all rest satisfied; Miss Thelluson will never again enter my house until she enters it as my wife. Then, sisters, whether you like her or not, you must pay her the respect due to a brother's wife, or else I am your brother no longer."

​He had taken a high tone—it was wisest; but now he broke down a little. In that familiar home, with the familiar faces round him, two out of them just missing, and forever, it was hard to go against them all. And when—the gentlemen having prudently stepped out of the room—the women began sobbing and crying, lamenting over the terrible misfortune which had fallen on the family, things went very sore against Bernard.

"And supposing the bill you talk of does not pass, and you can not carry out this most unnatural, most indecent marriage," said Lady Rivers, "may I ask what you mean to do? To go abroad and get married there, as I hear some people do? though afterward, of course, they are never received in society again. Or, since ladies who can do such unlady-like things must have very easy consciences, perhaps Miss Thelluson will excuse your omitting the ceremony altogether."

Bernard sprang up furious. "If you had not been my father's wife, and my father only this day buried, you and I should never have exchanged another word as long as I lived. As it is, Lady Rivers, say one word more—one word against her—and you will find out how a man feels who sees the woman he loves insulted, even by his own relations. Sisters!"—he turned to them, almost entreatingly, as if in his natural flesh and blood he might hope to find some sympathy—"sisters, just hear me."

But they all turned away, including Bertha, whom poor Adeline had judged rightly as a mere coquette, and who evidently was not at all anxious that brothers-in-law, however convenient to flirt with, should be allowed to marry their deceased wives' sisters. She stood aloof, a pattern of propriety, beside the rest; and even made some sharp, ill-natured remark concerning Hannah, which Hannah heard, and lifted up reproachful eyes to the women whom she had been helping and comforting, and feeling affectionately to, all. the week, but who now held themselves apart from her, as if she had been the wickedest creature living.

​"You know that is untrue, Bertha. I was perfectly sincere in every word I uttered; but, as Mr. Rivers says, people's feelings change. I did not care for him in the least then—but I do now. And if he holds fast by me, I will hold fast by him, in spite of you all."

Slowly, even mournfully, she said this; less like a confession of love than a confession of faith—the troth-plight which, being a righteous one, no human being has a right to break. They stood together—these two, terribly sad and painfully agitated, but still firm in their united strength—stood and faced their enemies.

For enemies, the bitterest any man can have—those of his own household—undoubtedly Bernard's sisters and their mother now were. It seemed hardly credible that this was the same family who, only a few hours ago, had wept together over the same open grave, and comforted one another in the same house of mourning. Now out of that house all solemnity, all tenderness had departed, and it became a house full of rancor, heart-burning, and strife.

Long the battle raged, and it was a very sore one. A family fight always must be. The combatants know so well each other's weak points. They can plant arrows between the joints of the armor, and inflict wounds from behind; wounds which take years to heal—if ever healed at all. Hannah could hardly have believed that any persons really attached to one another, as these were, could have said to one another so many bitter things within so short a time; such untrue things also, or such startling travesties of truth; such alterations of facts and misinterpretations of motives that she sometimes stood aghast and wondered if she had not altogether deceived herself as to right and wrong, and whether she were not the erring wretch they made her out to be. Only her—not him; they loved him; evidently they looked upon him as the innocent victim to her arts—the fly in the spider's web, glad of any generous kindred hand that would come and tear it down, and set him free. Unfortunate Bernard!

He bore it all for a good while—not, perhaps, seeing the ​whole drift of their arguments—till some chance speech opened his eyes. Then his man's pride rose up at once. He walked across the hearth, and once more took hold of Hannah's hand.

"You may say what you like about me; but if you say one word against her here, you shall repent it all your lives. Now this must end. I have heard all you have to say, and answered it. Sisters, look here. You may talk as much as you like, seeing you are my sisters, for ten minutes more"—and he laid his watch on the table, with that curious mixture of authority and good-humor which used to make them say Bernard could do any thing with any body. "After that you must stop. Every man's patience has its limits. I am the head of the house, and can marry whomsoever I choose; and I choose to marry Miss Thelluson, if I have to wait years and years. So, girls, you may as well make up your minds to it. Otherwise, when she is Lady Rivers—as one day she may be—you would find it a little awkward."

He half smiled as he spoke; perhaps he knew them well enough to feel sure that the practical rather than the sentimental side was the safest to take them on; perhaps, also, he felt that a smile was better than a furious word or a tear—and both were not far off, for his heart was tender as well as wroth; but the plan answered.

Lady Rivers gave the signal to retire. "For this night, Miss Thelluson, I suppose you will be glad to accept the shelter of our roof; but perhaps you may find it not inconvenient to leave us to-morrow. Until that desirable event, which Bernard seems so sure of, does take place, you will see at once that, with my unmarried daughters still under my charge—"

"It will be impossible for you to keep up any acquaintance with me," continued Hannah, calmly. "I quite understand. This good-night will be a permanent good-by to you all."

Lady Rivers bowed. But she was a prudent woman. It was a perfectly polite bow—as of a lady who was act​ing not so much of her own volition as from the painful pressure of circumstances.

Hannah rose, and tried to stand without shaking. Her heart was very full. The sense of shame or disgrace was not there—how could it be, with her conscience clear, and Bernard beside her?—but bitter regret was. She had been with his people so much of late that sorrow had drawn them closer to her than she had ever believed possible. Likewise they were his people, and she still tried to believe in the proverb that "blood is thicker than water."

"I have done you no harm—not one of you," she said, almost appealingly. "Nor your brother either. I only loved him. If we are ever married, I shall devote my life to him; if not, it is I that shall suffer. In any case, my life is sad enough. Do not be hard upon me, you that are all so happy."

And she half extended her hand.

But no one took it. Neither mother nor sisters gave one kind word to this motherless, sisterless woman, whom they knew perfectly well had done nothing wrong—only something foolish. But the foolishness of this world is sometimes higher than its wisdom.

"Good-night,” said Bernard; "good-night, my dearest. You will find me waiting at the railway at eight o'clock tomorrow morning to take you direct to Lady Dunsmore's."

With a chivalric tenderness worthy of his old crusading ancestors—those good knights, pledged to Heaven to succor the distressed—he took Hannah by the rejected hand, kissed it before them all, led her to the door, and, closing it upon her, went back to his mother and sisters.