"Then help me; do help me. I will go on my knees to him to beg his pardon."
"I do not know what to say to it. Begging his pardon will be of no avail. As for myself, I should not dare to tell him. We used to think, when he was hopeless before, that dwelling on it all would drive him to some absolute madness. And it will be worse now. Of course it will be worse."
"What am I to do?" Mary paused a moment, and then added, sharply,—"There is one thing I will not do; I will not go to the altar and become his wife."
"I suppose I had better tell Frank," said Mrs. Fenwick, after another pause.
This was, of course, what Mary Lowther desired, but she begged for and obtained permission not to see the Vicar herself that evening. She would keep her own room that night, and meet him the next morning before prayers as best she might.
When the Vicar came back to the house, his mind was so full of the chapel, and Lord St. George, and the admirable manner in which he had been cajoled out of his wrath without the slightest admission on the part of the lord that his father had ever been wrong,—his thoughts were so occupied with all this, and with Mr. Puddleham's oratory, that he did not at first give his wife an opportunity of telling Mary Lowther's story.
"We shall all of us have to go over to Turnover next week," he said.
"You may go. I won't."
"And I shouldn't wonder if the Marquis were to offer me a better living, so that I might be close to him. We are to be the lamb and the wolf sitting down together."
"And which is to be the lamb?"