And he was. All this was only a trifle, a secondary point of delicacy, a nothing; it had no influence upon his fate, it did not wound his feelings; the calamity that had come upon him left him no sensitiveness to spare for minor suffering. He never saw Hester now; but that was accident, not design: he had not the remotest notion that she had any meaning in his life beyond the trifling meaning she had always had; he never thought of her at all, indeed. When she was in town Ellen was much with her, he knew; and he also knew that she had procured the living whose charms had diverted Decimus from those of black heathendom; he knew that Ellen was to pass some time with her at Middlemeads in the autumn; but that was all. It had occurred to him to wonder a little how Ellen would feel at Middlemeads without Katharine. But Robert knew his sister; and he smiled at the passing thought, and at himself. So Hester was in possession. The dream she had dreamed had become a reality. She was mistress of Middlemeads, owner of the home of her unconscious enemy, and of the possessions which had belonged to the man who had preferred another before her. More than this, she was the wife of the man her enemy had loved--still loved, perhaps: she had no clue to Katharine's thoughts, no power to read the change which time had wrought in her. Was ever revenge so safe, so sure as hers? was ever revenge so complete? And it had not compromised her in the least: she was all the richer in money, and none the poorer in friends; she could talk of Mrs. Streightley with polite pity, and if by any extraordinary chance the fugitive should ever again come to the surface of society, she could even meet her, unsuspected, unrebuked. Truly her success had been marvellous, her good fortune and her good management unsurpassed; and her secret was so entirely her own. A little impetuousness, the least loss of self-control, and she might have betrayed herself to Thacker. (Hester was quite unconscious of the tone in which she had spoken in the church-porch on the occasion of Robert's marriage.) But she had never lost her self-control; and he knew nothing. Supposing him to suspect, what matter? she dreaded not suspicion, but knowledge.