“I won’t!” he said.
“You are quite sure, sir? However I behave? And even if I run away from you?”
“Quite sure!”
And a few minutes later, “Poor Sutton!” he said. “We must try to make it up to him.”
She laughed.
“It is a good thing you did not set out to woo me,” she answered. “For you would not have shone at it. Make it up to him indeed! Make it up to him! What a thing, sir, to say to—me!”
* * * * *
It was not made up to Mr. Sutton; though the best living that could be procured by an exchange with the Bishop of Durham—and there were fat livings in Durham in those days, and small blame if a man held two of them—was found for the chaplain. He married, too, a lady of the decayed house of Conyers of Sockburn, beside which the Damers and the Clynes were upstairs. And so both in his fortune and his wife’s family he did as well—almost—as he had hoped to do. But though he accepted his patron’s gift, he came seldom to Clyne Old Hall; and some held him ungrateful. Moreover, a little later, when to be a radical was not counted quite so dreadful a thing, he turned radical in all but the white hat. And Clyne was disappointed, but not surprised. Henrietta, however, understood. Though children running about her knees had tamed her wildness and caged her pride, she was still a woman, and the memory of a past conquest was not ungrateful. She had no desire to see the pale replica of Mr. Pitt, but she sometimes thought of him, and always kindly and with gratitude.
There was a third lover, of whom she never thought without unhappiness.
“You will never tell the children? You will never tell the children?” was her prayer to her husband when Walterson was in question.