had had another son, older than this, but he had died; she had married very late in life. Her husband had occupied a good post in a manufactory at Paisley, in Scotland, and there her little boy had been reared. Upon her husband’s death that summer, she had left the place and come back to her native country, England. So far as that, Mrs. Smith was communicative enough; but beyond these points she would not go; and upon Lady Jane’s rather pressing one or two questions, the widow was quite rude. Her business was her own, she said, and she did not recognise the right of strangers to pry into it. Lady Jane was baffled. Of course it might all be as the woman said; but there was a certain secrecy in her manner that Jane suspected. She had, however, no plea for pressing the matter further; and she preferred to wait and, as it were, feel her way. But she thought of it incessantly, and it had rendered her usually equable manner occupied and absent, so much so as to have been observed by Lucy.
“Is it anything about Laura?” asked Lucy, in answer to Jane’s last observation.
“Oh no. Nothing at all.”
“Do you think, Jane, that Laura is happy? She seems at times so strangely restless, so petulant.”
“Lucy, I hope she is happy: I cannot tell. I have observed what you say, but I know nothing.”
“Mr. Carlton seems very indulgent to her,” returned Lucy.
And in point of fact, Lucy had been quite struck with this indulgence. Jane’s own decision, not to visit at the house of Mr. Carlton, whether springing from repugnance or pride, or what not, she had strictly adhered to, but she had not seen fit to extend the prohibition to Lucy; and Lucy was often at Laura’s, and thus had an opportunity of seeing Mr. Carlton’s behaviour to his wife. She told Jane that she liked Mr. Carlton better than she had liked him as a little girl; she remembered, she said with a laugh, that she then entertained a great prejudice against him; but she liked him now very well, and he was certainly fond of Laura. Jane agreed that Mr. Carlton’s manners were gentlemanlike and agreeable; she had now and then met him in society, and nothing could be more courteous than was Mr. Carlton’s manner to herself; but, into his house Jane still declined to enter.
“I think he has always been most indulgent to her,” observed Jane. “Laura, I fear, is of a difficult temper, but———Are we going to have visitors to-night?”
The break in her sentence was caused by a visitor’s knock. Impromptu evening visitors to Lady Jane Chesney were not common. The servant opened the drawing-room door.
“Mr. Frederick Grey, my lady.”
Lucy threw down her embroidery. Jane smiled; the dull evening had changed for Lucy.
He came in with a radiant face. They questioned him upon his appearance in South Wennock, when they had believed him in London, reading hard for his degree. Frederick protested his uncle John had invited him down.
“I suppose the truth is, you proffered him a visit,” said Jane. “Or perhaps came without any notice to him at all.”
Frederick Grey laughed. The latter was in truth the fact. But Frederick never stood on ceremony at his uncle John’s: he was as much at home there as at his father’s.
And as the days went on and the sickness in South Wennock increased, Mr. John Grey declared that his nephew’s visit was the most fortunate circumstance that could have happened. For the medical men were scarcely equal to the additional calls upon them, and Frederick took his full share of the duty. So, after all, the visit, which had been intended by him to be nothing but a short and delightful holiday with Lucy Chesney, was changed into one of labour, and—in one sense—disappointment. For he could only venture to see her once in a way, every other day or so; neither had he time for more; and then, with all the precaution of changing his clothes.
Lady Laura Carlton’s feet seemed instinctively to take her to Blister Lane, past the front of Tapper’s cottage. Jealousy has carried women to more inconvenient places. The unhappy suspicion—how miserably unhappy it was to be in its ultimate effects, neither Laura nor any one else could dream of!—connecting her husband with that little child had grown to a height that was scarcely repressible; and Laura was in the dangerous frame of mind that has been metaphorically designated as touchwood—wanting but a spark to kindle it into a flame.
Not a day passed but she was walking down Blister Lane. She would take her way up the Rise, turn down the lane, pass the cottage, which was situated at this end of it, walk on a little way, and then come back again. All as if she were taking a walk to get a mouthful of fresh air. If she saw the little boy in the garden she would stop and speak to him; her jaundiced eyes devouring the likeness which she thought she detected to Mr. Carlton; it seemed that she could never tire of looking at it.
It was not altogether the jealousy itself that