'
'Ah! Then she is very unhappy!' said Squire Dornell.
His wife was silent.
''Tis that accursed marriage!' continued the Squire.
Still his wife would not dispute with him. 'She is outside in the
carriage,' said Mrs. Dornell gently.
'What--Betty?'
'Yes.'
'Why didn't you tell me?' Dornell rushed out, and there was the
girl awaiting his forgiveness, for she supposed herself, no less
than her mother, to be under his displeasure.
Yes, Betty had left school, and had returned to King's-Hintock. She
was nearly seventeen, and had developed to quite a young woman. She
looked not less a member of the household for her early marriage-
contract, which she seemed, indeed, to have almost forgotten. It
was like a dream to her; that clear cold March day, the London
church, with its gorgeous pews, and green-baize linings, and the
great organ in the west gallery--so different from their own little
church in the shrubbery of King's-Hintock Court--the man of thirty,
to whose face she had looked up with so much awe, and with a sense
that he was rather ugly and formidable; the man whom, though they
corresponded politely, she had never seen since; one to whose
existence she was now so indifferent that if informed of his death,
and that she would never see him more, she would merely have
replied, 'Indeed!' Betty's passions as yet still slept.
'Hast heard from thy husband lately?' said Squire Dornell, when they
were indoors, with an ironical laugh of fondness which demanded no
answer.
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