The countess nodded. "She and MacIvor arrived here this morning by the Scotch mail. Sandy had an unexpected summons to London, from the lawyers who are acting for him in the action about that small property he lays claim to; and when he was starting from home, nothing would do for Adela, it seems, but she must accompany him."
"Has Harriet come also?" asked Lady Sarah.
"No. Sandy goes back in a day or two."
"And Adela? Does she return with him?"
"I don't know. Sir Sandy says she seems miserable with them, and he thinks she will be miserable everywhere."
"Where is she?" asked Frances.
"Upstairs somewhere: Grace is with her. Grace pities and soothes her just as though she were a martyr—instead of a silly woman who has wilfully blighted her own happiness in life, and entailed no end of anxiety on us all."
After their short stay in Paris in the spring, where we last saw Lady Adela, the MacIvors went straight to Scotland, avoiding London and the cost that would have attended a London season, which they could ill afford. Adela also shrank from that; she would have left them had they sojourned in the metropolis. They took up their abode in the Highlands, in the old castle that was the paternal stronghold of the MacIvors, which was utterly bleak, dull, and remote; and, here, for the past three months, Adela had been slowly dying of remorse.
No wonder. Her mind, her whole being, so to say, was filled with the image of her husband; with the longing only to see him; with the bitter, unavailing remorse for the past. That one solitary sight of him, in Paris at Mrs. Blunt's, had revived within her the pain and excitement, which had been previously subsiding into a sort of dull apathy. The château in Switzerland had been, as a residence, lonely and wearisome; it was nothing, in those respects, compared with this old castle of Sir Sandy's. At least, Adela, found it so. In fact, she did not know what she wanted. She shrank from even the bare suggestion of publicity, and she shrank from solitude. She felt herself in the position of one whose whole interest in life has departed while yet a long life lies before her: the saddest of all sad positions, and the most rare.
Was it to continue so for ever and for ever? Yes, she would wail out in answer, when asking herself the question: at least, as long as time should last. For there could be no change in it. She had forfeited all possibility of that. The lone, miserable woman that she was now, must she remain to the end.