‘As if the abbey and the hot-houses made any difference! Well, darling, I am not going to worry you about poor Edgar. You must choose your own way of being happy. I would not for all the world that you should marry a man you did not love; but I should have been so glad if you could have loved Edgar. And I think, dear, that unintentionally—unconsciously even—you have done him a wrong. You have led him to believe you like him.’ ‘And so I do like him, better than anyone in the world—after my own flesh and blood.’ ‘Yes, dear. But he has been led to hope something more than that. I fear he will feel his disappointment keenly.’ ‘Nonsense, Lina. Don’t you know that six months ago he was still suffering from his disappointment about you? and now you imagine he is going to break his heart for me. A heart so easily transferred cannot be easily broken. It is a portable article. No doubt he will carry it somewhere else.’ She kissed her sister and ran out of the room, leaving Madoline anxious and perplexed, yet not the less resolved to endow Daphne with half her wealth as soon as she came of age. ‘Providence never intended that two sisters should be so unequally circumstanced,’ she said to herself. ‘Willy-nilly, Daphne must accept what I am determined to give her. The lawyers will find out a way.’ CHAPTER XVI. ‘NO MAN MAY ALWAY HAVE PROSPERITEE.’ Edgar Turchill did not go to the other end of the world to hide his grief and mortification at this second overthrow of his fondest hopes. He absented himself from South Hill for nearly a month, yet so contrived as that his absence should not appear the result of pride or anger. Mrs. Turchill’s annual sea-side holiday was as much an institution as the opening of Parliament, or the Derby: and she expected on all such occasions to be escorted and accompanied by her only son. She liked a fashionable watering-place, where there was a well-dressed crowd to be seen on parade or pier; she required to have her leisure enlivened by a good brass band; and she would accept nothing less in the way of lodgings than an airy bay-windowed drawing-room in the very best part of the sea front. ‘If I am not to come to the sea-side comfortably I would rather stay at home,’ she said to her confidante Deborah; an axiom which Deborah received as respectfully as if it had been Holy Writ. ‘Of course, mum. Why should you come away from Hawksyard to be cramped or moped?’ said Deborah. ‘You’ve all you can wish for there.’