"Do you love him at all now?"
"I love the Robert who wooed and married me, as much as ever I did; the Robert of the last five or six years, I do not wish to see again. I have been away from him four years, and I cannot hope that his manner of life has improved him."
"How has he lived?"
"From what Isabel told me, I should say his family had full dominion over him for two years; the result being the tearing to pieces of the home he made for me, and the handing over to his sister everything that was mine. The last two years he has lived a solitary life at his club, no doubt self-indulgent, self-centred, and self-sufficient."
"Theodora, no one but God knows anything about Robert. He would show himself to no one—I mean his real self. Do not judge him on the partial evidence of his sister. She would look no further than his words and actions."
"I wish I had heard nothing about him. I thought he was out of my life forever."
"Do not let the matter disturb you, until you are compelled to. Grace for the need is sure. Nowhere have I seen, grace before the need promised."
"You are right, mother, we will go on with our lives just as if this visit had never happened. I will neither hope nor doubt. I will do my day's work, and leave all with God."
So the Newton House went back to its calm routine, and Theodora taught and wrote, and helped her mother with her housekeeping, and her father with copying his manuscripts, and her boy with his lessons, and the days passed into weeks, and the weeks into months, and the promise of Robert's coming became as a dream when one awakeneth.
Yet all was proceeding surely, if leisurely, to the appointed end. In about eight weeks, the Wyntons arrived in London, and following their usual habit delayed and delayed there, for a whole week before starting for Scotland. But once at Wynton Castle, Isabel felt freed from her promise of silence, and she wrote to Robert a few days after her return home, the following note: