“It is quite true, and it is perfectly fair that you should remind me of it,” rejoins Mrs. Darcy, humbly and ruefully; far too intent on her object to resent or even notice any blow that her self-esteem may suffer on the way to it. “I was paltry enough to allow myself to be blinded by his silly little foibles to his great qualities; but of late, during Sir George’s illness, realizing, as I have done--as every one must have done--all that he has had to give up, and with what perfect self-effacement he has done it----” Lavinia breaks in upon her with a terrible jocosity. “You have forgiven him his old lace and his Elzevirs! Well, better late than never!” Her friend stares at her with aghast, wide-open grey eyes, as of one who sees a hideous blighting transformation taking place in a dear and familiar object. “You are right!” she says, under her breath. “I thought him completely unworthy of you, so unworthy that your loss would cause him very little pain so long as he could keep, as you say, his ‘old lace and his Elzevirs;’ while in another direction I saw, or thought I saw, a possibility----” Her voice dies falteringly away. Lavinia looks at her stoically. “You need not distress yourself; you have neither made nor marred in the matter.” Another grim silence. “Will you empower me to tell Rupert?” “Tell him what?” “Will you tell him yourself?” “Tell him what? There is nothing to tell.” The rector’s wife pauses, brought up against this wall of senseless brazen denial; her thin sensitive face even whiter than its white wont; but she is not easily baffled, nor apt to abandon a task because it wrings her withers. “My dear,” she says, taking gently hold of the girl’s coldly pendant hand, and using an endearment uncommon to her, being one sparing of banal caresses, “do you think that you are doing Rupert a kindness in providing him with a wife who avoids his look, winces at his voice, and shudders at his touch?” “What the eye does not see, the heart does not feel. He will never know!” There is a wretched callousness in her voice, whose counterfeitness a slight shiver betrays. “_Not know! Rupert not know!_” The words, and the inflection that accompanies them, bring home to Lavinia the fact, on which she has often laughingly expatiated to her friend, of the extraordinary intuitive knowledge of her possessed by Rupert; of her absolute inability to keep one half-thought or fancy from his ken. That he should so turn over and handle the innocent trivialities of her mind and heart, has formerly been a matter of jest. Now the thought that there will be no secret place in her soul into which she can retire from him with her terrible secret, no gourd under whose shade she can sit hugging her misery undetected, breaks down the fortification of her numbness, and leaves the breach open for active conscious agony to march up and take possession. She draws her cold fingers from Mrs. Darcy’s pitying clasp, and turns upon her.