It is fortunate for her that both her travellers are too much occupied with their own misadventures to ask her many questions about the disposition of her time. The trip has been neither satisfactory nor final. An entry in a baptismal registry is not to be found, and a second, if not a third visit to the lawyers will probably be necessary. Two dull evenings have been passed at a hotel, as Sir George, with his usual ingenuity in making life as disagreeable to himself as he can, has morosely refused to spend them at any place of entertainment; and Rupert--as seems a matter of course to them all--has foregone his own friends and pastimes to keep him company. The only bright spots in their history appear to be that Rupert, who to his other graces adds a connoisseurship in old silver, has picked up a George III. Loving-cup at a shop in the Strand for an old song; and that Sir George has met with some patterns of wall-paper that please him for two rooms which have not been used of late years, and in whose doing-up he takes an interest in striking contrast to his usually absolute indifference to the internal details of his household. “They would make a nursery look nice and bright,” he says, displaying them to his niece, and speaking with that uncompromising outspeaking of his hopes, which has often before inflamed her cheeks. It is with an inward convulsion of dismay that she realizes how enormously her repulsion for the topic, thus introduced with Saxon simplicity, has grown since it was last broached to her. Yet she must get used to it. She has never hitherto flinched from the necessary and the actual. There _will_ be, in all human probability, a nursery; there _will_ be children; and they will be hers--theirs. “Yes, very bright and pretty.” He looks at her with a touch of solicitude, though without a grain of suspicion. “Have you got a cold? I always tell you that you go too thinly clad.” “No, thanks; not in the least. Why do you think so?” “Your voice sounded hoarse, as if your tonsils were relaxed.” But Lavinia’s tonsils are all right. CHAPTER XIV “A côté du bonheur” “All these things are against me!”