‘And now I must go,’ said Mr. Plowden. ‘Of course, anything and everything I can do, Emily--when you have tried what is to be accomplished in your own way----’ He turned towards the door, and then returned again, with a still more cloudy face. ‘My dear sister,’ he said, in a tone of solemnity and tenderness adapted to the words, ‘you may have to seek his help for this; but for all our sakes do not, any more than you can help, have young Mr. Swinford here.’ Lady William looked up quickly with a half-defiant glance. ‘Above all’ said the Rector impressively, ‘while there is any sort of doubt, any sort of cloud, and when every step you take will be remarked---- Don’t make me enter into explanations, but, for all our sakes, don’t have Mr. Swinford always here.’ XXXVIII It is almost needless to say that the Rector left his sister in a state of mind in which exasperation healthily and beneficially contended with despair. She might have been crushed altogether by his discovery; but he had managed to mingle with that so many other sentiments that Lady William felt herself no broken-down and miserable woman, but a creature all full of fight and resistance--tingling, indeed, with pain, and scorched with a fire of injury, feeling insulted and outraged to the depths of her being, but all the same full of angry strength and force, determined that nothing as yet was lost, and that sooner than yield herself to the tolerance of her sister-in-law and indulgent interpretations of her friends, who would pity and assure each other that whatever dreadful thing had really happened, poor Emily, a mere child at the time, was innocent--there was nothing she was not capable of doing. To change from Lady William--in a sort, the head of the little community--to poor Emily, was a thought which fired her blood. For that, as well as for her child, the small motive thrusting in in the immediate present into the foreground--there was nothing she would not do. To find Artémise was a trifle to her roused and indignant soul. If she went out herself on foot with a lanthorn, she said to herself with a vehemence which soon turned into an angry laugh, she would find her. The lanthorn and the search on foot turned it all into stormy ridicule, as the Rector’s suggestion that the little, dingy, dark private chapel had been burned and the books destroyed as a natural consequence of her folly in being married there, had done. Lady William felt the laughter burst out in the middle of the bitter pain. For the pain was bitter enough down in the breast from which that stormy humour burst, so sharp that she could not sit still, but went raging about like--as she said to herself--a wild beast, pushing the crowded furniture aside, holding her hands together as if to keep down the anguish by physical torture. A thumbscrew or a deadly boot to crush her flesh would have been something of a relief to her in the active anguish of her soul. Mab to hear that