The next morning, after Mr Brandon and Mrs Null had breakfasted together, the mistress of the house, having apparently finished the performance of the duties which had kept her from the breakfast-table, had some conversation with her visitor. In this he repeated very little of what he had said to the younger lady the night before, but he assured Mrs Keswick that he had discovered that it would be a very delicate thing to propose to her niece a divorce from her husband, a thing to which she was not at all inclined, as he had found. "Of course not! of course not!" exclaimed Mrs Keswick. "She can't be expected to see what a wretched plight she has got herself into by marrying this straggler from nobody knows where." "But, madam," said Mr Brandon, "if you worry her about it, she will leave you, and then all will be at an end. Now, let me advise you as your lawyer. Keep her here as long as you can. Do everything possible to foster friendship and good feeling between her and Junius; and to do this you must forget as far as possible all that has gone by, and be friendly with both of them yourself." "Humph!" said the widow Keswick. "I didn't ask you for advice of that sort." "It is all a part of the successful working of the case, madam," said Mr Brandon. "A thorough good feeling must be established before anything else can be done." "I suppose so," said the old lady. "She must learn to like us before she begins to hate him. And how about your niece? Are you going to send her down here to help on in the good feeling?" "I have not brought my niece into this affair," replied Mr Brandon, with dignity. "Well, then, see that you don't," was the widow Keswick's reply. And the interview terminated. When Mr Brandon rode away on his good horse Albemarle, he looked at the post of the road gate from which he was lifting the latch by means of the long wooden handle arranged for the convenience of riders, and said to himself: "John Keswick was a good man, but I don't wonder he came out here and shot himself. It is a great pity though that it wasn't his wife who did it, instead of him. That would have been a blessing to all of us. But," he added, contemplatively, as he closed the gate, "the people in this world who ought to blow out their brains, never do." Soon after he had gone, Mrs Null went up Pine Top Hill, and sat down on the rock to have a "think." "Now, then, Freddy," she said, "everything depends on you. If you don't stand by me I am lost--that is to say, I must go away from here before Junius comes; and you know I don't want to do that. I want to see him on my account, and on his account too; but I don't want him crammed down my throat for a husband the moment he arrives, and that is just what will happen if you don't do your duty, Mr Null. Even if it wasn't for you, I don't want to look at him from the husband point of view, because, of course, he is a very different person from what he used to be, and is a total stranger to me.