"No doubt of that. She is downstairs."
"Who is downstairs?"
"She. So madam has just informed me."
"There's the gong."
"And be hanged to it!" returned Arthur, getting into his coat. "I wish to goodness madam did not give us the trouble of putting on dinner dress every other day! Neither are entertainments seemly in your house during these troubled times."
"What's more, I don't see how they will be paid for, if the trouble continues," candidly spoke Richard. "Madam must be uncommonly sanguine to expect it."
"Or careless," returned Arthur Bohun. "Dick, my friend, it's a bad sign when a man has no good word to give his mother."
That every grain of filial affection had long gone out of his breast and been replaced by a feeling akin to shame and contempt, Arthur Bohun was only too conscious of. He strove to be dutiful; but it was at times a hard task. Living under the same roof as his mother, her sins against manners and good feeling were brought under his notice perpetually; he was more sensitively alive to them than even others could be.
Since Arthur Bohun had quitted the army and recovered from the long sickness that followed on his wound, Dallory Hall had been his ostensible home. Latterly he had made it really so; for Dallory Ham contained an attraction from which he could not tear himself. Ellen Adair had his heart's best love: and, far from her he could not wander. A pure, ardent love, honourable as every true passion must be in an honourable man, but swaying his every action with its power. Sir Nash Bohun invited him in vain. His aunt, Miss Bohun, with whom he was a great favourite, wondered why he went so rarely to see her; or, when he did go, made his visit a flying one. Arthur Bohun possessed a few hundreds a-year: about four: just enough to keep him as a gentleman: and he had none of the bad habits that run away with young men's money. Miss Bohun would leave him fairly well off when she died: so he was at ease as to the future. One day, after he had been at Dallory Hall for a few months, he put a hundred-pound banknote into Richard North's hands.
"What is this for?" questioned Richard.