season in London, his days and nights passed with all that was beautiful, he had returned there, to that little country parsonage, that he might throw himself again at her feet. And she—she had refused to see him, though she loved him with all her heart; she had refused to see him because she was so vile a coward that she could not bear the sour looks of an old woman.
"I will come down directly," she said, when Fanny at last knocked at the door, begging to be admitted. "I won't open it, love, but I will be with you in ten minutes—I will, indeed." And so she was; not, perhaps, without traces of tears, discernible by the experienced eye of Mrs. Robarts, but yet with a smooth brow, and voice under her own command.
"I wonder whether she really loves him," Mark said to his wife that night.
"Love him!" his wife had answered; "indeed she does; and, Mark, do not be led away by the stern quiet of her demeanor. To my thinking she is a girl who might almost die for love."
On the next day Lord Lufton left Framley, and started, according to his arrangements, for the Norway salmon fishing.
Harold Smith had been made unhappy by that rumor of a dissolution, but the misfortune to him would be as nothing compared to the severity with which it would fall on Mr. Sowerby. Harold Smith might or might not lose his borough, but Mr. Sowerby would undoubtedly lose his county, and in losing that he would lose every thing. He felt very certain now that the duke would not support him again, let who would be master of Chaldicotes, and as he reflected on these things he found it very hard to keep up his spirits.
Tom Towers, it seems, had known all about it, as he always does. The little remark which had dropped from him at Miss Dunstable's, made, no doubt, after mature deliberation, and with profound political motives, was the forerunner, only by twelve hours, of a very general report
