attempt expressing fond thoughts, soothing motives, and yet confessions of impatience—mixed up with accounts of children’s complaints, their faults, and their schooling—country gossip, and fashionable arrivals, with some stray suggestions and admissions, never before confided to him, of a pious kind: and when long afterwards came the events at Stoke, instead of any undue flutter or sense of importance being caused in her, she had fallen in as naturally to title or prospects, as she had sat before that at the head of their dinner-table in Golden Square. It was no doll’s disposition, as had been at the time hinted round some ill-natured card-tables in that region; if one thing more than another troubled Sir Godfrey in their present plans, it was that he believed devoutly in his wife’s aptitude for a high station, where expectations would be formed and occasions raised; his feeling was—and the partiality was excusable—that her chief value lay obscured in ordinary circumstances. Whereas at the new abode in Paris, with ample scope and convenience, all the earlier habits of domestic superintendence seemed returning, the making, baking, mending—almost even to washing; in reference to which alone Lady Willoughby seemed really active, and the more so that everything might go on as in England, had the mere economy of the thing not been a vital point. Her pleased air would alone have hindered him from reasoning it with her, had Sir Godfrey so much as dreamt, in the latter respect, how their case really stood: and when, indeed, there did lie any care on his mind, which he might be unwilling she should share, yet so gently did the conversation win it from him, and so quietly did something like the old manner woo him to bear no burden alone, that, ere he knew, it was no longer his, but they were talking of it plainly. What tranquil reassurance _then_, and grave, prompt advertence to the point—and pure sympathy, and that repose of soul from which a woman’s instinct can express so much by a tone, a look, silence itself! Sir Godfrey had sometimes been ashamed to find how much more he could be disturbed by trifles, or how cautiously he had been underrating his wife’s affection. So that she knew as well as he did, and almost as soon, how affairs stood at Stoke, with the tenor of his brother’s intended will, and any the slightest incident which could concern them. He had even casually mentioned, as among the more trivial, Sir John’s wishes for the benefit of the person entitled Suzanne Deroux, for Lady Willoughby had long known, of course, what of Sir John’s early history his brother knew. The matter had well-nigh escaped his memory, he said; till on happening to want a banker in Paris, it struck him that the house formerly employed by his brother, in the payment of the annuity referred to, might suit himself. To these gentlemen, accordingly, he had sent a memorandum of the address left by Sir John, with a request that they would have the money paid to her.