"I hope you will excuse my mentioning it, sir, but if there is one thing beyond another that raises Mrs. Cook's irritableness, and makes her perverse towards the rest of the household, it is to hear the soup was allowed to grow cold."
"All right, Tynon: Mrs. Harrison's nerves shall not be upset this evening. We will go down now," says 'Duke, with a smile—a very impoverished specimen of its kind, I must own, but still a smile.
I rush into the next room—my dressing-room is off my boudoir—and having bathed my poor eyes and hastily brushed my hair and given myself a general air of prosperity make for the dining-room. On the stairs we encounter mother, looking so pale and wan, and almost terrified, that I take my hand off Marmaduke's arm and slip it round her waist. It will never do for her to present such a woful countenance to the criticism of servants.
"Try to look a little more cheerful, darling," I whisper, eagerly; "it will not be for long: as it has to be gone through, let us be brave in the doing of it."
She looks at me with a relieved astonishment; and truly the strength of will that bears me through this interminable evening amazes no one so much as myself.
----
Hazelton down by the sea, I have gained your shelter at last. Only yesterday, Marmaduke and I finished our miserable journey here, and took a long, a last, farewell of each other.
How can I write of it, how describe the anguish of those few minutes, in which a whole year's keenest torture was compressed? How paint word by word the mad but hopeless clinging, the lingering touch of hands that never more should join, the despair, the passion, of the final embrace.
It is over, and he is gone, and I have fallen into a settled state of apathy, and indifference to what is going on around me, that surely bears some resemblance to a melancholy madness.
Hazelton is a very pretty, old-fashioned house, about half the size of Strangemore—with many straggling rooms well wainscoted almost three parts up each wall. Some of the floors are of gleaming polished oak, some richly, heavily carpeted. It is a picturesque old place, that at any other time, and under any other circumstances, would have filled me with admiration.