He had done it! No matter what noise accompanied the removal of horse and rider, the wife, whom in his sober hours he professed to love so passionately lay insensible to sight or sound, and wakened only to a morrow of delirium. CHAPTER THE FORTY-FIFTH. WOUNDS INFLICTED AND ENDURED. The spark lies cold in the flint until it is struck; and Ellen had not believed her quiet husband capable of so much passionate indignation as burst from him on the receipt (at Sheffield) of the details just given. “Brute! ruffian!” burst from his lips, as the letter he had crushed in his grasp fell to the floor; and with a stamp he rose to his feet, pressed one hand across his knitted brows, and paced the dingy carpet from end to end in a state of restless perturbation, his wrath finding vent in epithets and invectives foreign to his tongue. “Whatever is the matter, Jabez, love?” Ellen asked in amazement. “Oh, Ellen, dear! that brute Aspinall——” He could get no further. Feeling choked his utterance. She picked up the crumpled letter, and with almost equal exasperation and pain made herself mistress of its contents, in her womanly indignation and love for her cousin losing sight of her husband’s excessive emotion. Jabez left his journey unfinished, and drove back home with all speed. Ellen shared with Mrs. Ashton and her own mother the anxious watch in that large dim room, where the favourite of the family tossed her head from side to side, and muttered incoherent words. In the sudden emergency, Bob the old groom’s recommendation of his own daughter as a wet-nurse for the poor frail baby passed without cavil. Not until long afterwards was it known that Sarah Mostyn was the last woman to have entered that house, and on such a footing. One month, two months wore out before Augusta rallied, and Mr. Windsor, whose medical creed was to “let nature take its course,” pronounced her out of danger, and fit for the removal contemplated by her friends, and resisted by Laurence. Double doors, however, could not exclude outer sounds, and so long as she shrank and shuddered at every crunch on the gravel, every echo of his raised voice, recovery was retarded. So the elder Mr. Aspinall, exasperated with his son, and most solicitous for the welfare of his son’s charming wife, added his dictum to that of the doctor, offered his own carriage for her conveyance, and threatened to disinherit Laurence if he interfered. Once in her childhood’s home she amended rapidly, but with increasing strength came maternal yearnings for her infant, still in charge of the wet nurse at Fallowfield. A hackney-coach was sent to bring Sarah Mostyn with the child to its mother; but not a step would the nurse budge. She had no orders from her master, and the master paid her wages, and she, “shouldna tak’ orders from annybody else.” Messages were sent, and notes were written to Laurence, which he tore to shreds; but he kept away from his wife, and kept back the child.