At length she pined so much for her “dear babe,” that Mr. Ashton and Jabez together sought Laurence out in one of his haunts (a tavern near Cockpit Hill), to prevail on him to let Augusta have her boy with her. “Mrs. Aspinall herself deserted her child,” he replied, all the more haughtily that Jabez was Mr. Ashton’s seconder. “When Mrs. Aspinall thinks fit to return home to her maternal and wifely duties, she will find the nursery door open, and her son in trustworthy care. A true wife’s place is by her husband’s hearth.” “Yes, sir, when the husband is a true man,” replied Jabez, with decision. “And who dares to say I am not a true man?” retorted Laurence boldly. “I do!” promptly answered the other. “No true man would have imperilled his wife’s life by a reckless drive in the dark night in a tandem Tilbury! Only a reckless madman or a ruffian would have forced a horse into a wife’s sick-chamber, to drive her delirious with terror!” “And pray, sir,” haughtily responded the other, “how long has Mrs. Aspinall made _you_ her confidant?” “I have not the honour of Mrs. Aspinall’s confidence,” answered Jabez sturdily, looking him full in the face; “such facts are trumpet-tongued.” “Just so,” put in Mr. Ashton, drawing his arm through that of his junior partner. “And the fact that Augusta shrinks at your name has spoken so loudly to us that if ever she sits on your hearth again it won’t be with my consent.—Come away, Clegg.” After this declaration, Aspinall changed his tactics. He wrote to his wife, requesting her return; then entreating it; and finally went in person to beseech her to “come back,” vowing to “atone for the past with the devotion of a life.” The young mother yearned for her babe, the tender-hearted wife could not resist the appeal of the husband whom with all his faults she yet loved; and, regardless of the previsions of her mother, or the entreaties of her father, she allowed him to drive her home again to the Grange. Her first thought was the nursery. There she found, in addition to her own boy, drawing its sustenance from the nurse’s breast, a well-dressed child, some two years old, playing with a wooden milkmaid-rattle on the rug. Something in the child’s face and auburn curls made her ask, “Sarah, whose child is that?” “Mine. Whose should it be?” was the pert answer; and the boldness of the woman’s manner checked further inquiry. But Augusta’s heart had received a shock which shook the pedestal on which her idol sat enthroned. For a short pace Laurence kept terms with his wife; and before her father or strangers he was her most devoted slave; but she underwent a species of slow torture in secret. She soon found that Sarah Mostyn was mistress of the house as well as of the nursery, and that Sarah Mostyn’s child was of as much importance as her own baby-boy.