Mrs. Wesley, incapable of a lie or anything resembling it, bent her head. "I have been afraid, once or twice," she said. "So you send me away? That seems to me neither very brave nor very wise. Will there be less danger at Kelstein?" Her mother started. "Does _he_ know of your going? You don't tell me he means to visit you there?" "Forgive me, dearest mother, but your first question is a little foolish--eh?" Hetty laughed and quoted: "But if she whom Love doth honour Be conceal'd from the day-- Set a thousand guards upon her, Love will find out the way." She put up her chin defiantly. "I wish, child, you would tell me if--if this is much to you," said Mrs. Wesley wistfully, with a sudden craving to put her arms around her daughter and have her confidence. Hetty hesitated for a fatal moment, then laughed again. "I am not a child precisely; and we read one another, dear, much better than we allow. Your second question you have no right to ask. You are sending me away--" "No right, Hetty?" "You are sending me away," Hetty repeated, and seemed to be considering. After a pause she added slowly: "You others are all under papa's thumb, and you make me a coward. But I will promise you this"--here her words began to drag--"and to strengthen me no less than to ease your fears, I promise it, mother. If the worst come to the worst, it shall not be at Kelstein that I choose it, but here among you all. I think you will gain little by sending me to Kelstein, mother: but you need not be afraid for me there." "You speak in enigmas." "And my tone, you would say, is something too theatrical for your taste? Well, well, dear mother, 'tis the privilege of a house with a doom upon it to talk tragedy: for, you know, Molly declares we have a doom upon us, though we cannot agree what 'tis. I uphold it to be debt, or papa's tantrums, or perhaps Old Jeffrey [apparently the Wesley family ghost] but she will have it to be something deeper, and that one day we shall awake and see that it includes all three." "It appears to be my doom," said Mrs. Wesley, her face relaxing, "to listen to a deal of nonsense from my daughters." "And who's to blame, dear? You chose to marry at twenty, and here you have a daughter unmarried at seven and twenty. Now I respect and love you, as you well know: but every now and then reason steps in and proves to me that I am seven years your senior--which is absurd, and the absurder for the grave wise face you put upon it. So come along, sweet-and-twenty, and help me pack my buskins." Hetty led the way upstairs humming an air which (though her mother did not recognise it) was Purcell's setting of a song in _Twelfth Night_: "Journeys end in lovers meeting, Every wise man's son doth know." CHAPTER VII.