Just then, in his soreness of heart, Jerry was not sorry that a legitimate fit of illness detained him in the house at Wilmothurst, and separate from Bella; for he was hourly stung by tidings--exaggerated in some instances--that Lord Twesildown was daily giving her drives with his mother, and mounts of his best horses; and, as he was known to be rather impecunious, and quite _au fait_ of the fact that Bella Chevenix was her father's heiress, Jerry felt jealous, mortified, and bitter. He even sorely regretted the 'gushing' farewell letter he had written to her before entering Coomassie; and could little conceive that even now, in a silken case, she wore that letter in her bosom! It was quite evident how hotly jealous he was of Twesildown, and this sentiment Cousin Emily left nothing undone or unsaid to fan. 'How you chatter, cousin,' said he, impatiently. 'I am like the brook, you think, on this subject,' said Emily, with one of her sweetest smiles. 'What brook?' 'I go on for ever.' 'By Jove, you do--and with a will, too!' said Jerry, who was now stretched at full length in a hammock netting between two trees on the lawn, lazily enjoying one of the last box of cigars he might open in Wilmothurst, as his family were contemplating a removal therefrom, and for where was quite undecided. Mr. Chevenix had courteously left his card for Jerry, so Bella knew that, come what might, the latter in common civility would call ere long; and to that event she was looking forward now; but days passed, and Jerry came not. And so while Bella, remembering the tenor of her last farewell meeting with Jerry, and that of the treasured letter, which amounted to a declaration, was eating her heart out with disappointment that he made no effort to see her, he was daily being 'primed up' by Cousin Emily with jealousy of Twesildown; and _this_ was the time to which he and she had both looked forward so eagerly! The bitterness of this situation was enhanced to Jerry by the knowledge that his ancient inheritance of Wilmothurst was Bella's _dot_ and known to be such by Twesildown, to whom it was a lure quite as much as her undoubted brilliance and beauty. 'There is the devil to pay and pitch-hot here about the mortgages,' he wrote to Bevil Goring; 'and moreover, old fellow, I am sorely disappointed in my love affair. I have read that what "drives one man to drink drives another to the _demi-monde_." Whether of the two is worse, the immortal gods can tell. Either remedy is worse than the disease, I fancy! But anyway a few months more will see me again broiling up country, and going in for iced drinks and Chinsurah cheroots.' CHAPTER XV. IN BAYSWATER.