Mrs. Jerningham gave her consent for the ordering of the manure, though she had a dim idea that in the matter of manure she was marked as the victim of extortion. She looked about her as she went slowly back to her favourite green walk by the river. She looked at the forcing-pits and hot-houses, the perfectly trained wall-fruit--which might have shown beside the symmetrical pears and plum-trees of Frogmore--and she reflected how much they had cost, and how little happiness they had given her. “One cannot force happiness,” she said to herself. “Or if one does, it is like the peaches we ripen in February--almost flavourless.” She went down to the green, sheltered walk, where the low plashing murmur of the river seldom failed to tranquillize her spirits. Here she could think quietly of the one subject which was all-important to her anxious mind. That Lucy Alford loved Laurence Desmond she was fully assured: _that_ point she had long settled for herself. The one portentous question yet unanswered was, whether Laurence loved Lucy. Mrs. Jerningham had watched the two closely, and she suspected Laurence with a direful suspicion, but she could not be sure that he had merited her doubts. “If I thought that he loved her, I would end this miserable farce at once,” she said to herself, “and set him free. How many times I have offered him his freedom! And he has refused it, and assured me--in his cold, measured, _friendly_ way--of his unchanging constancy. Hypocrite!” she muttered, between her clenched teeth. And then there came upon her an awful yearning for some death-dealing weapon, with which, at one fell swoop, she might annihilate the man she loved. “Oh, how dearly I loved him,” she thought; “how dearly I loved him! How I used to yearn for his coming; how willingly I would have endured poverty and trouble for his sake--in those old happy days when I was free to be his wife! And he waited till his income should be large enough for a suitable establishment, and let another man marry me!” Did Laurence love Lucy? That was the question which Mrs. Jerningham would fain have solved. But to send Lucy to Ireland was scarcely the way to arrive at a solution. It was rather like begging the question. “She will tell him she is going, directly she sees him,” said Mrs. Jerningham; “and he must be a consummate hypocrite if his manner then does not betray him.” Laurence was expected at noon that day--in half an hour. He was to come from Sunbury in his boat, to take the two ladies on their last excursion. Emily determined upon lying in wait for him, in order to be present at his meeting with Miss Alford. “I must see the first effect of the news,” she thought.