“It is ruin and destruction!--ruin and destruction!” she repeated to herself. And soon the whole house had received the same shock, and trembled under it to its foundations. Harry went off in high dudgeon, not finding the sympathy he (strangely enough, being a man of the world) had looked forward to as his natural right. The house, as I have said, quivered with the shock; a sense of sudden depression came over them all. Little Mary cried, thinking what a very poor-looking lot of relations she would carry with her into the noble house she was about to enter. Gussy, with a more real sense of the fatal effect of this last complication, felt, half despairing, that her momentary gleam of hope was dying away in the darkness, and began to think the absence of Edgar at this critical moment almost a wrong to her. He had been absent for years, and she had kept steadily faithful to him, hopeful in him; but his absence of to-day filled her with a hopeless, nervous irritability and pain. As for Lady Augusta, she lost heart altogether. “Your father will never listen to it,” she said--“never, never; he will think they are in a conspiracy. You will be the sufferer, Gussy, you and poor Edgar, for Harry will not be restrained; he will take his own way.” What could Gussy reply? She was older than Harry; she was sick of coercion--why should not she, too, have her own way? But she did not say this, being grieved for the unfortunate mother, whom this last shock had utterly discomposed. Ada could do nothing but be the grieved spectator and sympathizer of all; as for the young Beatrice, her mind was divided between great excitement over the situation generally, and sorrow for poor Gussy, and an illegitimate, anxious longing to see the “lovely creature” of whom Harry had spoken in such raptures. Why should not people love and marry, without all these frightful complications? Beatrice was not so melancholy as the rest. She got a certain amount of pleasure out of the imbroglio; she even hoped that for herself there might be preparing something else even more romantic than Gussy’s--more desperate than Harry’s. Fate, which had long forgotten the Thornleigh household, and permitted them to trudge on in perfect quiet, had now roused out of sleep, and seemed to intend to give them their turn of excitement again.