"Is it gone to the coach-maker's?—What is the matter with it."
"There is nothing the matter with it, sir; but Mr. Cartwright has got it."
"Then let my mare be saddled. She is in the stable, I suppose?"
"Mr. Corbold has had the use of your mare, Mr. Charles, for more than a month, sir: and terribly worked she has been, Dick says."
"Very well—it's no matter: I shall walk, William."
The servant retired, with an expression of more sympathy than etiquette could warrant. Helen looked at her brother in very mournful silence; but tears of indignant passion started to the bright eyes of Rosalind. "Is there no remedy for all this?" she exclaimed. "Helen, let us run away together. They cannot rob me of my money, I suppose. Do ask Sir Gilbert, Charles, if I am obliged to stay here and witness these hateful goings-on."
"I will—I will, Miss Torrington. It would, indeed, be best for you to leave us. But my poor Helen,—she must stay and bear it."
"Then I shall stay too: and that I think you might guess, Mr. Mowbray."
Rosalind's tears overflowed as she spoke; and Charles Mowbray looked at her with that wringing of the heart which arises from thinking that all things conspire to make us wretched. When he was the reputed heir of fourteen thousand a year he had passed whole weeks in the society of Rosalind, and never dreamed he loved her;—but now, now that he was a beggar, and a beggar too, as it seemed, not very likely to be treated with much charity by his own mother,—now that it would be infamy to turn his thoughts towards the heiress with any hope or wish that she should ever be his, he felt that he adored her—that every hour added strength to a passion that he would rather die than reveal, and that without a guinea in the world to take him or to keep him elsewhere, his remaining where he was would expose him to sufferings that he felt he had no strength to bear.