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‘Some people,’ Miss Pollingray said, I permitted themselves to think evil of my brother’s assiduous devotion to a married woman. There is not a spot on his character, or on that of the person whom Gilbert loved.’

I would believe it in the teeth of calumny. I would cling to my, belief in him if I were drowning.

I consider that those twenty years are just nothing, if he chooses to have them so. He has lived embalmed in a saintly affection. No wonder he considers himself still youthful. He is entitled to feel that his future is before him.

No amount of sponging would get the stains away from my horrid red eyelids. I slunk into my seat at the breakfast-table, not knowing that one of the maids had dropped a letter from Charles into my hand, and that I had opened it and was holding it open. The letter, as I found afterwards, told me that Charles has received an order from his uncle to go over to Mr. Pollingray’s estate in Dauphiny on business. I am not sorry that they should have supposed I was silly enough to cry at the thought of Charles’s crossing the Channel. They did imagine it, I know; for by and by Miss Pollingray whispered: ‘Les absents n’auront pas tort, cette fois, n’est-ce-pas? ‘And Mr. Pollingray was cruelly gentle: an air of ‘I would not intrude on such emotions’; and I heightened their delusions as much as I could: there was no other way of accounting for my pantomime face. Why should he fancy I suffered so terribly? He talked with an excited cheerfulness meant to relieve me, of course, but there was no justification for his deeming me a love-sick kind of woe-begone ballad girl. It caused him likewise to adopt a manner–what to call it, I cannot think: tender respect, frigid regard, anything that accompanies and belongs to the pressure of your hand with the finger-tips. He said goodbye so tenderly that I would have kissed his sleeve. The effort to restrain myself made me like an icicle. Oh! adieu, mon parrain!