"Leave Burleigh in peace, I beseech you!" said Maltravers, angrily.
"That is said like a Digby," returned Vargrave. "Allons!—will you not come home with us?"
"I thank you,—not to-day."
"We meet at Lord Raby's next Thursday. It is a ball given almost wholly in honour of your return to Burleigh; we are all going,—it is my young cousin's debut at Knaresdean. We have all an interest in her conquests."
Now, as Maltravers looked up to answer, he caught Evelyn's glance, and his voice faltered.
"Yes," he said, "we shall meet—once again. Adieu!" He wheeled round his horse, and they separated.
"I can bear this no more," said Maltravers to himself; "I overrated my strength. To see her thus, day after day, and to know her another's, to writhe beneath his calm, unconscious assertion of his rights! Happy Vargrave!—and yet, ah! will she be happy? Oh, could I think so!"
Thus soliloquizing, he suffered the rein to fall on the neck of his horse, which paced slowly home through the village, till it stopped—as if in the mechanism of custom—at the door of a cottage a stone's throw from the lodge. At this door, indeed, for several successive days, had Maltravers stopped regularly; it was now tenanted by the poor woman his introduction to whom has been before narrated. She had recovered from the immediate effects of the injury she had sustained; but her constitution, greatly broken by previous suffering and exhaustion, had received a mortal shock. She was hurt inwardly; and the surgeon informed Maltravers that she had not many months to live. He had placed her under the roof of one of his favourite cottagers, where she received all the assistance and alleviation that careful nursing and medical advice could give her.
This poor woman, whose name was Sarah Elton, interested Maltravers much. She had known better days: there was a certain propriety in her expressions which denoted an education superior to her circumstances; and what touched Maltravers most, she seemed far more to feel her husband's death than her own sufferings,—which, somehow or other, is not common with widows the other side of forty! We say that youth easily consoles itself for the robberies of the grave,—middle age is a still better self-comforter. When Mrs. Elton found herself installed in the cottage, she looked round, and burst into tears.
"And William is not here!" she said. "Friends—friends! if we had had but one such friend before he died!"