"If her child had only lived!" sighed Mrs. Lynn, alluding to Lady Adela.
"Quite new; new on today; and I am very glad you admire it," gaily answered Mary, as she spread out the dress with both hands, and turned herself about on her brother's dull red carpet for inspection. She was as thankful to drown the other subject as he was: she knew, unhappily, more about it than her mother. "I am going out on a visit, so of course I must have some pretty things."
"Going where?"
"To Lawn Cottage, at Netherleigh. Mrs. Dalrymple wants me—she is lonely there. I can only spare her a week, though: it will not do to leave mamma for longer. Alice is at Lady Sarah Hope's, you know, and Selina is in town, the gayest of the gay."
"Rather too gay, I fancy," remarked Mr. Grubb. "Mother," he added, turning from his sister, "I have just left your friend of early life—Miss Upton. She inquired after you."
"Very good of her!" retorted Mrs. Lynn, proudly and stiffly. "I do not care to be spoken to of Margery Upton, as you know, Francis. She—and others—voluntarily severed all connection between us in those early years. It pained me more than you, or any one else, will ever know; but it is over and done with, and I do not willingly recall it, or them, to my memory."
Ah! that separation might have brought keen pain to Mrs. Lynn in early days, but not so cruelly keen as the pain something else was bringing to her son in these later ones. As Francis Grubb, his visitors departed, took his place at his desk, and strove to apply his mind to his business, he found it a difficult task. Twice today had his wife's behaviour to him been remarked upon—by Miss Upton and by his mother. Was it, could it be the fact, that the unhappiness of his home, the miserable relations obtaining between himself and his wife, had become patent to the world? The draught had already been rising to a pretty good height in his cup of bitterness; this would fill it to the brim.
[CHAPTER XV.]
THE DAY OF RECKONING.
The hum of the busy London world came floating drowsily in through a bedroom window in Berkeley Street, open to the hot and brilliant summer day, and falling, unnoticed, upon the ears of Mrs. Oscar Dalrymple.