“I want you to let Innocent go to my sister,” said Vane, approaching her softly, “for a week or two perhaps. Don’t you think she should make acquaintance with her father’s relations? She is grown up; she has developed so much under your kind care. Could you not trust her, even for a few weeks, out of your own hands?” “Oh, Mr. Vane!” cried Mrs. Eastwood hastily, with tears coming to her eyes; “this is because of what you have just been hearing--because of what my daughter-in-law was so wicked and so cruel as to say.” “What is the matter?” said Molyneux to Nelly. “What _did_ she say? and what has he to do with it? and what does your mother mean by looking so excited? It all seems a pretty muddle for a man to fall into.” “What she said was about Innocent,” said Nelly, restraining herself with an effort; “that we ought not to keep her here--that she should be sent out as a governess--I don’t know how much more hard-hearted nonsense. I can’t tell how she dared to speak so to mamma.” “That woman would dare anything,” said Molyneux. “About Innocent? Well, I don’t know that she was very wrong; that girl will turn into a dreadful burden one day or other if she is not made to marry somebody. I can’t think what your mother meant, when she had such a chance, by letting Longueville slip through her fingers. So that’s why _he’s_ here, I suppose? I hate that man, John Vane; always poking himself where he is not wanted.” “I suppose mamma must have wanted him or she would not have asked him,” said Nelly. “We could not have an empty place at table.” “Oh, that’s why you are cross, is it?” said Ernest, with a vain laugh; “but, Nelly, you must not really expect that I can always be doing duty at those family parties. A family party is the thing I most hate in the world.” “Fortunately for mamma, Mr. Vane is not of your opinion,” said Nelly. It was the first time she had attempted anything like self-assertion. She had never stood at bay before. CHAPTER XXIX. INNOCENT’S OUTSET IN THE WORLD. In consequence of this interview between Mrs. Eastwood and John Vane it was arranged that Innocent should pay Miss Vane a visit at the High Lodge, near Sterborne, where that lady lived in an eccentric way of her own in an old house which her brother had abandoned to her, and which she had turned to a great many uses quite uncontemplated by her predecessors. “We are an eccentric race,” her brother had said, laughing; “but as it is my way to be good for nothing, so it is Lætitia’s way to be good for a great deal. The one of us neutralizes the other. I tell her she is trying to lay up a stock of superfluous merit on my account, one good result of having a brother a ne’er-do-well----” “Why should you call yourself a ne’er-do-well!” said Mrs. Eastwood. Nelly had already asked the same question furtively with a glance, and there was a warmth in the little outburst of partisanship by which these two women defended him against himself which warmed the man’s heart.