Edward arrived at Hazlehurst only the night before Mrs. Treverton’s dinner-party.
‘Oh, yes, I’m going,’ he told Celia, when she asked him if he had accepted Laura’s invitation. ‘I want to see how this Treverton fellow plays the country squire.’
‘As if to the manner born,’ answered Celia. ‘The part suits him admirably. I don’t want to wound your feelings, Ted, dear, but Mr. Treverton and Laura are the happiest couple I ever saw.’
‘“These violent delights have violent ends,
And in their triumph die,”’
quoted Edward, with a diabolical sneer. ‘I am not going to envy them their happiness, my dear. Whatever feeling I once entertained for Laura is dead and buried. A woman who could sell herself, as she has done—’
‘Sell herself! Oh, Ted, how can you say anything so dreadful? I tell you she is devotedly attached to John Treverton.’
‘And he rewards her devotion by running away from her before the end of their honeymoon; and when he turns up again, after an interval of six months or so, during which nobody knows what he has been doing, she receives him with open arms. A curious couple assuredly. But an estate worth fourteen thousand pounds a year excuses a good deal of eccentricity; and I can quite understand that Mr. and Mrs. Treverton are immensely popular in the neighbourhood.’
‘They are,’ said Celia, warmly; ‘and they deserve to be. If you knew how good they are to their tenants, their servants, and the poor.’
‘Goodness of that kind is a very sagacious investment, my unsophisticated child. It may cost a man five per cent. of his income, and it buys him respectability.’