"Good-bye, dear father!"
He nodded simply in reply; but, as he pursued his way eastward, his heart grew softer towards his child's lover than it would otherwise have been. How beautiful she had looked with those flushed cheeks and shining eyes! What was he that he should interfere with her happiness? If the man that she loved was good and true why should he not marry her, although he was a kinsman of the Vanes and the brother of a woman whom Westwood held in peculiar abhorrence? For accident had revealed to him many years before the relation between Sydney Vane and Florence Lepel, and she had seemed to him then and ever since to be less of a woman than a fiend. Yet, being somewhat slow in drawing conclusions, he had never associated her or her brother with Mr. Vane's death, until, in the solitude of his cell, he had laboriously "put two and two together" in a way which had not suggested itself either to himself or to his defenders at the time of the trial. He himself, from a strange mixture of delicate feeling and gruff reserve, had not chosen to tell what he knew about Miss Lepel and Sydney Vane; and only when it was too late did it occur to him that his silence had cost him his freedom, and might have cost him his life. He saw it all clearly now. It was quite plain to him that in some way or other Mr. Vane's death had been caused through his unfaithfulness to his wife. Some one had wished to punish him—some friend of hers, some friend of Miss Lepel's. Right enough he deserved to be killed, said Westwood to himself, as he elaborated his theory. If only the slayer, the avenger, had not refused to take the responsibility of his act upon his own shoulders! "If only he hadn't been cur enough;" Westwood muttered to himself, as he went along the London streets, "to leave me—a poor man, a common man, that only Cynthia loved—to bear the blame!"
CHAPTER XXX.
When Hubert Lepel quitted Beechfield, a sudden calm, almost a stagnation of interest, seemed to fall upon the place. Mrs. Vane was said to be "less strong" than usual; the spring weather tried her; she must be kept quiet, the doctor said, and, if possible, tranquil in mind.
"God bless my soul, isn't she tranquil in mind?" the General had almost shouted, when Mr. Ingledew gave this opinion. "What else can she be? She hasn't a single thing to worry her; or, if she has, she has only to mention it and it will be set right at once."
The village doctor smiled amiably. He was a pale, thin, dark little man, with insight rather in advance of his actual knowledge. He would have been puzzled to say why he had jumped to the conclusion that Mrs. Vane's mind was not quite tranquil; but he was sure that it was not. Possibly, he was influenced by the conviction that it ought not to be tranquil; for, in the course of his visits among the villagers, he had heard some of the ugly rumors about Flossy's past, which were more prevalent than Mrs. Vane herself suspected and than the General ever had it in his power to conceive.
"Well, sir," he said—for Mr. Ingledew was always very deferential to the Squire of the parish—"what I meant was more perhaps that Mrs. Vane requires perfect freedom from all anxiety for the future than that she is suffering from uneasiness of mind at present. Possibly Mrs. Vane is a little anxious from time to time about Master Dick, who is not of a particularly robust constitution, or perhaps about Miss Vane, who does not strike me as looking exactly what I should call 'the thing.'"
"No—does she, Ingledew?" said the General, diverted at once from the consideration of his wife's health to that of his niece. "She's pale and peaky, is she not? Have you seen her to-day?"