To return, however, to the conversation with which this chapter begins. It took place on the morning after Mrs. Frederick’s outburst, and was the end of the adjourned discussion which Vane had begun on the previous evening. He had found some trouble in soothing Mrs. Eastwood, and persuading her that his proposal had nothing to do with what Amanda had said, but had been in his mind for some time previously. When he succeeded in this, everything was easy enough. It was certainly well that Innocent should be made acquainted with her family, her father’s relations. “If anything were to happen to me,” Mrs. Eastwood allowed with some pathos, “it would be an excellent thing that she should have other friends to fall back upon. Frederick could not, I fear, give her a home, as I might have hoped, and as for Nelly, I don’t know how Nelly may be situated,” the mother said, looking at her daughter. She did not know what was in Nelly’s mind; but that Ernest should be ready to give succour and shelter to a penniless dependent was a thing which, at this stage of affairs, with her present knowledge of Ernest, Mrs. Eastwood could not hope. “It was with no such lugubrious idea that I made my proposal,” said John Vane, laughing. “But Innocent is nearly eighteen, and there could not be an easier plunge into life for her than a few weeks at the High Lodge. My sister has made half a convent, half a school, of the old house. I wish you would come too, and see what she is doing. But if not, I will take my little cousin down and leave her with Lætitia. It will teach Innocent the use of some new faculties. You have taught her only how to be carried about and cared for and tended----” “I have not spoiled her, I hope,” said Mrs. Eastwood, who was not, however, displeased with the compliment. When a woman comes to that stage of life in which all that she does and says is no longer admirable, because she says and does it--when she begins to feel the force of hot and hostile criticism and to be shaken even in the natural confidence with which she has been accustomed to regard her own motives, then praise becomes very sweet to her; it restores her to the moral standing-ground which she seemed to have lost. Mrs. Eastwood had just accepted with a natural pleasure John Vane’s testimony to her goodness, when Frederick came in suddenly, with a harassed look upon his face. Frederick had been in the country shooting, as he said--for some time--without his wife; and had come back looking pale, as he used to look after his absences in the old days. “Something is wrong?” said his mother, divining what his looks meant as Vane discreetly withdrew.