‘He has left me everything that he could!’ she said to her husband. ‘James, will you forgive me now, and stay?’
‘I cannot stay.’
‘Why not?’
‘I cannot stay,’ he repeated.
‘But why?’
‘I don’t like you.’
He acted up to his word. When she came downstairs the next morning she was told that he had gone.
* * * * *
Laura bore her double bereavement as best she could. The vast mansion in which she had hitherto lived, with all its historic contents, had gone to her father’s successor in the title; but her own was no unhandsome one. Around lay the undulating park, studded with trees a dozen times her own age; beyond it, the wood; beyond the wood, the farms. All this fair and quiet scene was hers. She nevertheless remained a lonely, repentant, depressed being, who would have given the greater part of everything she possessed to ensure the presence and affection of that husband whose very austerity and phlegm—qualities that had formerly led to the alienation between them—seemed now to be adorable features in his character.
She hoped and hoped again, but all to no purpose. Captain Northbrook did not alter his mind and return. He was quite a different sort of man from one who altered his mind; that she was at last despairingly forced to admit. And then she left off hoping, and settled down to a mechanical routine of existence which in some measure dulled her grief; but at the expense of all her natural animation and the sprightly wilfulness which had once charmed those who knew her, though it was perhaps all the while a factor in the production of her unhappiness.