'Have you done, doctor?' cried Mrs Mowbray haughtily: 'have you said all that Miss Mowbray and you have invented to insult me?'
'Your child send me to insult you!—She!—Adeline!—Why, the poor soul came broken-hearted and post haste from France, when she heard of your misfortunes, to offer her services to console you.'
'She console me?—she, the first occasion of them?—But for her, I might still have indulged the charming delusion, even if it were delusion, that love of me, not of my wealth, induced the man I doted upon to commit a crime to gain possession of me.'
'Why!' hastily interrupted the doctor, 'everyone saw that he loved her long before he married you.'
The storm, long gathering, now burst forth; and rising, with the tears, high colour, and vehement voice of unbridled passion, Mrs Mowbray exclaimed, raising her arm and clenching her fist as she spoke, 'And it is being the object of that cruel preference, which I never, never will forgive her!'
The doctor, after ejaculating 'Whew!' as much as to say 'The murder is out,' instantly took his hat and departed, convinced his labour was vain. 'There,' muttered he as he went down stairs, 'two instances in one day! Ah, ah,—that jealousy is the devil.' He then slowly walked to the hotel, where he expected to find Adeline and Glenmurray.
They had arrived about two hours before; and Adeline in a frame of mind but ill fitted to bear the disappointment which awaited her. For, with the sanguine expectations natural to her age, she had been castle-building as usual; and their journey to London had been rendered a very short one, by the delightful plans, for the future, which she had been forming and imparting to Glenmurray.
'When I consider,' said she, 'the love which my mother has always shown for me, I cannot think it possible that she can persist in renouncing me; and however her respect for the prejudices of the world, a world which she intended to live in at the time of her unfortunate connexion, might make her angry at my acting in defiance of its laws,—now that she herself, from a sense of injury and disgrace, is about to retire from it, she will no longer have a motive to act contrary to the dictates of reason herself, or to wish me to do so.'
'But your ideas of reason and hers may be so different—'
'No. Our practice may be different, but our theory is the same, and I have no doubt but that my mother will now forgive and receive us; and that, living in a romantic solitude, being the whole world to each other, our days will glide away in uninterrupted felicity.'