Why should he cause a restraint? her boy! but she felt that he did so, and it made her unhappy. It was pleasanter in the former evenings, when Mr. Beresford came home only now and then, and there was neither a Cara nor an Oswald to perplex the simple state of affairs. ‘How is she to amuse herself!’ Mr. Beresford said to her. ‘Yes, yes, I know you will do what you can--when was there ever a time when you did not do what you could and more?--but I cannot take her about, I cannot have anyone in the house to keep her company, and how is she to live there, a young girl, alone?’ ‘I think Cara will do very well,’ said Mrs. Meredith. ‘She can always come to me. I have told her so; and the people we know are all beginning to call. She will soon have plenty of friends. People will invite her, and you must go with her here and there.’ ‘_I_ go with her? You know how I hate going out!’ ‘Once at least--say only once. You must do that, and then you will find Cara will have her own friends; she will not be a difficulty any longer. I am glad you trust in me to do what I can for her--and Oswald.’ ‘Of course I trust in you,’ he said; ‘but it will break up everything. I know it will--after coming to a kind of calm, after feeling that I can settle down again, and that life is not utterly distasteful to me--you will not wonder that I should be frightened for everything. And you, who have done so much for me.’ ‘I have not done anything,’ said Mrs. Meredith, looking up smiling from her book. ‘You say so; but it is you who have done everything; and if I am to be plucked from my refuge now, and pitched forth upon the world---- I believe I am a coward. I shrink from mere outside intercourse, from being knocked up against one and another, and shut out from what I prize most.’ ‘How can that be?’ she said; ‘you get fretful, you men, when everything does not go as you wish. Have a little patience. When Oswald came home, it seemed at first, as if he, dear boy, was going to upset all my habits; but it was a vain fear. The first little strangeness is over, and he has settled down, and we are happy--happier than ever. It will be the same with Cara and you.’ Beresford gave a half-groan of dissent. I fear Mrs. Meredith saw that it had a double meaning, and that it expressed a certain impatience of her son as well as of his daughter; but this was one of the things which she would not see. ‘Yes,’ she said, with a little nod of her head, ‘I will answer for it, it will be just the same with Cara and you.’