From her father and Cicily both she had gathered the truth of that night’s exploits. His misrepresentations no longer misled; but for very fear she held her peace. He went on— “Madam, that night’s savage attack cancelled every debt of gratitude I owed the calculating knave who turned his back on my father’s £500, thinking to multiply it by thousands from _your_ father!” “It is not true!” she dared to say, her sense of justice and her spirit of resistance rising in defence of one she knew to be foully aspersed. Not because he was Jabez Clegg but because he was an absentee maligned. A shriek rang through the big house, and servants came scurrying up, with Mr. Aspinall in their midst; and Cicily, the first to dash between them, caught on her well-covered back the blow from the madman’s brace, which would else have fallen afresh on the naked shoulders of his wife, already scored by it with livid welts. Carry away the fainting lady—soothe the infuriated savage—apply raw beef to shoulders as red, if not as raw—let the brute steep himself in brandy unto stupefaction. The morning will come, when the fumes of passion and brandy will alike have passed away, and the man will repent him of his cruelty. But the sting of groundless jealousy will remain, and the broad livid stripes across the white shoulders. Time and care will efface those marks, but neither kisses, nor caresses, nor presents, nor time itself can obliterate the hieroglyphics stamped with that buckskin brace on the young wife’s heart. He has fixed the name of Jabez Clegg there, and in conjunction “brute” and “liar,” as equivalent to his own. It might have been expected after this that the Aspinalls would have been conspicuous by their absence from the cousin’s wedding, or that Augusta might have laid her wrongs before her mother. But, no; your jealous man never spares himself a pang if he hopes to inflict one; and the wilful woman who finds she has made a mistake in marriage is the last to confess it. Cold weather and recent indisposition served as an apology for the violet velvet spencer which, worn above the pale lilac silk, covered bust and neck; and it was far from unbecoming to the young matron or the occasion.