“I’ll go back if you counsel it,” submitted Lady Bell desperately, setting off in nervous haste to the house. “But how am I to face him? if he have strength left to lift his hand still, will he strike me as I have seen him strike his man? Or, if he is gone, must I stay in the house with the dead, I who never saw anybody die but Lady Lucie, who died blessing me? Would that I had minded her precepts better; she would not have had me leave the worst of husbands. And how many miles will it be to post cross country, Mrs. Sundon? you have a good head and may guess. Can you tell me if I shall be as long in going as I was in coming here? only I did not come straight! Oh! will you be so kind as to lend me the money you think I shall need, for I have only three crowns in my purse?” “My dear, I shall take you,” said Mrs. Sundon quietly. “Do you think I would send you off on such an errand alone?” “Oh, I am so thankful,” Lady Bell admitted in her relief, “now I may do my duty at last; no, I don’t mean that,” she checked herself the next moment, “I cannot hear of you doing such a thing. How could you leave your baby? You are too delicate yet for such a journey—and to go to that neighbourhood above all others. It is vastly generous of you to propose it, just what I should have expected from you; but, of course, I cannot consent; I shall manage by myself, somehow.” “Say no more, Lady Bell,” Mrs. Sundon put an end to the discussion, “I am going with you. The child will do very well with her nurse. Do you think I would put my child, any more than myself, between me and my duty and privilege? I should call that treating my child very ill, paying her a poor compliment, for which I should hope she would never thank me. I am abler for the journey than I was for coming here. I need not fear to go near Chevely, which has been sold, as I dare say you’ve heard. You cannot tell what I can do without harm to my health,” declared Mrs. Sundon, with a little bitterness. “I travelled from what had been my home, handed into the carriage by a bailiff on starting, and went out of town when my child was no more than ten days old. I could not have slept another night under that roof. But even if I had been a weaker woman, I should not have shrunk from this poor effort, and you would not have refused me my right.” Lady Bell had no longer the heart, any more than the will, to decline Mrs. Sundon’s support in the emergency. If Mrs. Sundon’s presence made Mr. Trevor mad—should he regard it as another act of wilful disobedience even when Lady Bell was pretending to obey him—it would be time enough then to undertake the ungracious task of refusing the elder woman’s countenance.