"But without some effort on my part it will be a life of half penury and whole obscurity in Finglecombe. But how is that effort to be made? You would not have our boy grow up the associate and companion of these villagers and lace-makers! Among whom else will his lot be cast? I would rather see him in his grave, Mary." "Do not say so. The misfortunes you have undergone have made you unreasonably bitter; but let us hope, Greville, for the best," she added, running her slender fingers caressingly through his thick dark hair. "Bitter! unreasonable! Have I not been mulcted of my proper inheritance? Is not the position--the rank which ought to have been mine and my father's before me--now held by another? Have I not been robbed by fashionable gamesters, swindlers, and false friends!" "Yet it is for such society as those that you repine!" "It is not so, Mary; what happened once could never happen again. I know better now." "The man who calls himself Lord Oakhampton----" "And who holds the broad lands and stately house that should be mine--knows well, if the world at large knows it not--through a quibble he is a usurper! Oh, my own Mary!" he exclaimed, while tears glittered in his flashing eyes, and he glanced with angry scorn round the tiny apartment, "when I wooed and won you in the happy past time, you who were reared in the lap of luxury, wealth, and refinement. I little foresaw that I would ever bring you, in the end, to a home so humble as this!" "But I am with you to share it, Greville, and I do not repine--unless, perhaps, for the child's sake. But why do you tell me these things again and again, darling? Is it," she added, with one of her brightest and most witching smiles, "to lure me into repeating how much and how truly I love you, as if I were a girl again in that second London season, which ended so sweetly for us both?" She would have thrown her soft arms around him, but a spirit of anger filled his heart, and he paced to and fro the little room like a caged lion; and Mary regarded him anxiously, for she had a dread of her husband's crotchets taking some active and dangerous form, especially if he were again to have that Californian dream; for when one's life, as a writer says, is a constant trial, "the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering;" and Mary was indeed far from strong. There was a greater delicacy in her constitution than Greville was the least aware of, a delicacy that, though it alarmed herself, for his sake and their child's she kept her lips sealed on the subject, lest the knowledge thereof might add to the regret of Greville for the past, and his "worry" for the present.