"Shoreditch is named after her, you know," put in Mr. Smith. "Poor thing! she was very lovely: raven hair and eyes of a violet blue, say the old chronicles. Keep your own counsel, young lady, implicitly--and be silent for your own sake." Miss Blake said good morning, and walked away. The prospect suggested to her, as to the fine and imprisonment, looked anything but a pleasant one. She resolved henceforth to _be_ silent; to Mrs. Cleeve and to all else: and, under the influence of this new and disagreeable suggestion, she wished to her heart she had never opened her lips to Lady Andinnian. "Meddlesome tabby cat," aspirated the gallant Mr. Smith. "She might play up Old Beans with her tongue. Women are the very deuce for being ill-natured to one another." CHAPTER XVIII. A Night Alarm. Colonel and Mrs. Cleeve had departed again, and the time went on. Foxwood Court was comparatively quiet. The opening visits on all sides had been paid and returned, and there was a lull in the dinner parties. The weather continued most intensely hot; and people were glad to be still. Never had poor Lucy Andinnian felt the estrangement from her husband so cruelly as now. At first the excitement of resentment had kept her up, and the sojourn of her father and mother, together with the almost daily gaiety, had served to take her out of herself: it was only at night during the lonely hours, when trouble prevented sleep, that she had felt its keenest sting. But now: now when she and Karl were alone, save for Miss Blake: when she sat in her lonely room hour after hour, and had leisure to realize her true position, Lucy gave way to all the abandonment of grief her trial brought. It was indeed a bitter one; a fiery trial: and when she looked back to it in after days, she could never imagine how she had contrived to bear it. Love is an all-powerful master: an overfilling tyrant. In the first torments of awakened jealousy, it is all very well to take refuge in revengeful anger, and snap our fingers metaphorically at the beloved one, and say he may go promener. The reaction comes. Jealousy, alas, does not tend to extinguish love, but rather to increase it. Lucy Andinnian found it so to her cost. Her love for Karl had in no whit abated: and the very fact of knowing he paid these stolen night visits to the Maze, while it tortured her jealousy, in no way diminished her love. She was growing pale and thin; she questioned whether she had done wisely in undertaking this most cruel task of bearing in silence and patience, hoping it might bring him back to his true allegiance; for she knew not whether she could endure on to the end.