“I wonder has she yet offered him marriage?” she says, a remnant of amusement piercing through the habitual sadness of her face. “It is time that she did,” replies Mrs. Darcy, in the same key; adding, after a moment’s reflection, and in a lower tone, “It is quite fifteen months since she last proposed to any one.” Lavinia lays down her slips upon the blotting-pad, and sits looking straight in front of her, while with an awful clearness rise before her mind’s eye the events so inextricably entangled with Miss Prince’s declaration to Binning. “Why did you say that?” she asks, after a pause of quickened breathing, to which her friend listens with a trepidation which does not hinder a very valiant resolution to persevere. “Because you never allow me to mention him; because, as I may not speak of him naturally and simply, I must drag him in by the head and shoulders.” No answer. “Isn’t it a puerility to banish him from your speech--to go half a mile out of your way to avoid speaking his poor name--when we both know that he is never for one moment out of your thoughts? No; don’t interrupt me! I will have my say out this time! Never for one moment out of your thoughts--not even when you are laying eucharis lilies on Sir George’s grave, or editing Rupert’s poems.” Lavinia’s only answer is to take her hands off the manuscript before her, as if the indictment made against her rendered her unworthy to touch it; and her long arms drop to her side. “Can you deny it?” asks Mrs. Darcy, her _spirituelle_ pale face flushing with excitement, thinking that she may as well be killed for a sheep as a lamb, and kneeling down beside her friend to get compelling possession of one of her hands. “I insist upon your answering me!” For a moment or two of misgiving it seems to the rector’s wife as if her audacity of asking were to break against the same obstinacy of morbid silence as has rebuffed all her previous efforts to speak a forbidden name; but, after a while, Lavinia answers, a great sigh seeming to tear the words out of her breast-- “I do not deny it; though why you should have the brutality to force me to own it to-day, particularly, I do not know!” “Because he is in England!” replies Susan, speaking very softly, with a kindly dew of moisture, making tender her usually keen eyes; “because, this morning, I had a letter from him, with a London postmark!” The slips of Rupert’s poems blow off the bureau, and on to the floor, wafted to earth by the irony of a warm gust from the honied garden-beds outside; but Lavinia is not aware of it. The one hand that she has at liberty flies up to her forehead, as though she were blinded by a sudden light. “You _must_ have seen in the papers that the _Isis_, with his regiment on board, had reached Southampton; but, perhaps”--with a slight return of satire lightening the gravity of her eager tones--“perhaps--to be consistent--you do not allow yourself to glance at the war news.”