After this the household at the Abbey went on much as usual. Nita, though subdued, did not look utterly unhappy. Yet she was a most unhappy wife, and Jerome knew it well, and felt the unhappiness to be beyond his power of curing. Nothing would restore her happiness now, and nothing give her full contentment, except the knowledge that he loved her–perhaps not even that, if she knew all of his conduct towards Sara–for Nita was tender-hearted. In the meantime, there was that unalterable fact–the past, the one thing that no power in the heavens above or in the earth beneath could make different, or cause to be as if it had not been. Mr. Bolton was gone. John and Avice continued to bicker and squabble in a polite way, and were as much engrossed in one another as two really unselfish persons can be. Nita, as time progressed, kept more in the house, spent more hours on her sofa, with book and work, with Avice by her side, or Jerome, or alone with her dog Speedwell. She often sent them away, telling them she liked to be alone, and did not wish them to be tied to her. Jerome once uneasily inquired of Avice: ‘Are you sure Nita really prefers to be left with her book? What book is that she reads in so much?’ For Nita always closed the book when he approached, and laid it beside her in a manner which did not permit him to take it up. ‘It is the _Imitatione Christi_, Jerome; and I think she does like to be left with it,’ said Avice, abruptly. The one other intimate visitor beside John Leyburn, was Father Somerville. Nita saw very little of him. She now never offered the slightest remark upon his visits, almost ignoring them. Both Jerome and Avice imagined that her dislike to him had merged into a neutral feeling. Somerville himself, and he alone, was conscious how completely he was held at arm’s length by the lady of the house, by the insignificant girl whom he had covertly sneered at many a time, even while he was advising Wellfield to marry her. He did not speak of it to anyone, but Nita’s treatment of himself galled him, and it is to be feared that his bosom was not inhabited solely by that angelic mildness, that indifference to all slights and injuries which Father Ravignac, at any rate, would have us believe animates the breast of every true Jesuit. Father Somerville had expected that Mrs. Wellfield would be unhappy; he had even taken active steps for making her unhappy, and he had expected that her unhappiness would cause her to take counsel with some one, perhaps with him, who so well knew how to invite confidence. But that unhappiness had had quite a different effect. It had transformed the ‘insignificant girl’ into a perfectly dignified, self-possessed woman–a very sad woman, certainly, but one who wore her crown of sorrow without cries or appeals–one whose grief was confessed, if at all, as between herself and her God–not to him, or to any like him. He was bitterly mortified, and while his keen