"Where can I go?—where shall I be safe?" thought Adela to herself, as they went along. "I wonder—I wonder if Sarah would take me in?" came the next thought. "They"—the "they" applying to the legal thief-catchers—"would never think of looking for me there. Sarah is angry with me, I know, but she won't refuse to hide me. Darvy, direct the man to Colonel Hope's."
This last sensible injunction was a wonderful relief to Darvy's troubled mind. And to Colonel Hope's they went.
Lady Sarah "took her in," and Adela hid herself away in the bedroom of her sister Frances. Truth to say, they were in much anxiety themselves, the colonel included, as to what trouble and exposure might not be falling upon Adela. They did not refuse to shelter her, but they let her know tacitly how utterly they condemned her conduct. Lady Sarah was coldly distant in manner; the colonel would not see her at all.
Before the day was over—it was in the afternoon—Grace came to them with the truth—that Charles Cleveland was released and had gone to Netherleigh. Adela, perhaps not altogether entirely reassured about herself, said she would stay at the colonel's another night, if permitted: and she did so.
That was the explanation of Adela's absence from home. She had left the house in fear; not voluntarily to quit it or her husband. Her husband, however, not knowing this, took the opposite view, and dwelt upon it as he walked away from Lord Acorn's in the summer sun. Not that, one way or the other, it would make any difference to him.
Entering his house, Mr. Grubb went straight upstairs to his dressing-room, intending to change the coat he wore for a lighter one. The bedroom door came first. He opened that, intending to pass across it, when he came face to face with his wife.
Just for a moment he was taken by surprise, having supposed the room to be empty. She had returned from Lady Sarah's, and was standing at the dressing-glass, doing something to her hair, her bonnet evidently just taken off. She wore a quiet dress of black silk—the one she had gone away in.
That frequent saying, "the devil was sick," was alluded to a few pages back. It might again be quoted. Lady Adela, when she thought the trouble had not passed and her heart was softened, had mentally rehearsed once more a little scene of tenderness, to be enacted when she next met her husband. She met him now; and she turned back to the looking-glass without speaking a word.
She now knew that the danger was over; over for good. Charley was discharged, scathless; her own name had been kept silent and sacred—and there was an end of it.
She turned back to the glass, after looking round to see who it was that had come in, saying not a word. Possibly she anticipated a lecture, and deemed it the wisest plan to keep silent—who knew? Not Mr. Grubb. She gave him neither word nor smile, neither tear nor kiss.