"In mamma's dressing-room."
"And who are present at these prayers?"
"Mamma, and I, and Curtis, and Jem."
"Jem? Who is Jem, Fanny?"
"The new stable-boy that our minister recommended, Charles, when that poor deluded Dick Bragg was found walking in the fields with his sister Patty on the Sabbath."
"You don't mean that Dick Bragg is turned away? He was, without exception, the steadiest lad in the parish."
"Works! works!" exclaimed Fanny, wringing her hands. "Oh, Charles! how your poor soul clings to the perdition of works!"
"Gracious Heaven!" exclaimed Mowbray with great emotion, "where will all this end? What an existence for Helen, for Rosalind? Is there no cure for this folly,—this madness on one side, and this infernal craft and hypocrisy on the other?"
On hearing these words, Fanny uttered a cry which very nearly amounted to a scream, and running off towards the house with the fleetness of a startled fawn, left her brother in a state of irritation and misery such as he had never suffered before.
The idea of seeing Sir Gilbert Harrington immediately had perhaps more comfort and consolation in it than any other which could have suggested itself, and the lanes and the fields which divided Oakley from Mowbray were traversed at a pace that soon brought the agitated young man to the baronet's door.