There ensued no reproach from Mr. Barley's lips. At first she thought he was going to strike her, staring at her with his white and working face; but the minutes passed and he overcame his emotion. Perhaps he feared he might be tempted to strike her if he spoke: it seemed as if a blow had fallen on him—as if the depth of feeling aroused by her confession were, not so much wrath, as a sense of awful injury to himself that could never be repaired. "What became of the will?" was the only question he put when the silence was getting ominous to her ears. "I burnt it. It was done for you. Throughout my life I have had regard only to the interests of the Barleys. And this is my recompense—reproach and base ingratitude!" He quitted the room without speaking another word. This was the worst dose Mr. Edwin Barley had received. He knew that the disappearance of the will had been set down by some people to his own hands. Why, had not Sir Harry Chandos hinted as much, but an hour ago? He had treated the past insinuations with contempt, always insisting that there had been no will to abstract—for he fully believed his wife had herself repented of the testament and destroyed it. He knew how capricious Selina was; never keeping in the same mind two days together. And now he had to hear that the world was right and he wrong: the will _had_ been abstracted. It did not tend to soothe him, the being told that it was taken out of regard to him and to his monied interests. Altogether he deemed it well to cut short his interview with Mrs. Penn. That lady, finding the house intended to show itself inexorably inhospitable, put her bonnet on and went forth to the railway station of her own accord, her luggage behind her. Whether she should annoy Mr. Edwin Barley by sundry letters of reproach, one of the reproaches being that he had never cared for any living being but his doll of a wife; or whether she should wash her hands of him altogether, and treat him henceforth with silent contempt, she had not determined in her mind. She inclined to the letters. Taking her seat in a first-class carriage, she would have leisure to think of it and decide on her journey to London. CHAPTER XXX. THE LAST FRIGHT OF ALL. I saw none of them all the afternoon. After the departure of Mr. Edwin Barley, Sir Harry Chandos went out with Dr. Laken. Mrs. Chandos and Madame de Mellissie were in the east wing, and, I fancied, Lady Chandos with them. Emily had offered to take Mrs. Penn's place for a short while, so far as sitting with Mrs. Chandos went; it was one of the best-natured things I had known her do.