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The Halleck girls went early in July to the Profile House, where they had spent their summers for many years; but the old people preferred to stay at home, and only left their large, comfortable house for short absences. Their ways of life had been fixed in other times, and Mrs. Halleck liked better than mountain or sea the high-walled garden that stretched back of their house to the next street.
"And didn't the old gentleman know of his wife's absence?" "Sometimes. He used to ask me whether Mrs. Courtenay was at home, and then I was bound to tell the truth." By his own admission then, this man Short had informed the invalid of his wife's frequent absences. He was an informer, and as such most probably the enemy of both Mary and Ethelwynn.
It was delicious to be loved passionately, fiercely, like this to be carried off by force, as it were, by your own husband. But she did not understand how a man could change so much in a few weeks. Kenneth had always loved her deeply, but never had she known him display such ardor as this. She had heard that men change, particularly after long absences from home.
Fishing and shooting protracted into the season so far as almost to touch the edge of the winter, no longer served as satisfactory excuses for my absences; and there were some among my friends, who, in their speculations, came very near the truth, and hinted suspicions of some rustic passion.
Ellen did not move or manifest any consciousness when the steamer left her dock and moved out into the stream, or take any note of the tumult that always attends a great liner's departure. At breakfast-time her mother came to her from one of the brief absences she made, in the hope that at each turn she should find her in a different mood, and asked if she would not have something to eat.
Thornburgh was so much occupied in the fate hanging over Mary Jenkinson that she, for once, forgot to catechise Rose as to any marriageable young men she might have come across in a recent visit to a great country-house of the neighbourhood; an operation which formed the invariable pendant to any of Rose's absences. So, with a smiling nod to them both, the girl turned homewards.
Small, lean and sickly, painfully near-sighted, yet with an eye of fierceness and fire; her face wrinkled by the hands of care and evil passions still more than by Time, with a big man's voice, whose harshness made those in the next room tremble; yet feminine in her tastes, skilful with her needle, fond of embroidery work, striking the lute with a touch remarkable for its science and feeling, speaking many languages, including Latin, with fluency and grace; most feminine, too, in her constitutional sufferings, hysterical of habit, shedding floods of tears daily at Philip's coldness, undisguised infidelity, and frequent absences from England she almost awakens compassion and causes a momentary oblivion of her identity.
Wright and his large staff of helpers, every branch of the Scriptural Knowledge Institution had been found as healthy and fruitful during these absences as when Mr. Muller was in Bristol.
She had plenty of material for study, she said, in the library, and plenty of amusement in wandering about with the sullen Demon, who was her constant companion during his absences; and if he did force a governess upon her, she would certainly murder the woman, if only for the sake of bringing him into trouble.
She had freely expressed the anxiety caused by Sylvia's first appearance on the domestic horizon, but for a year or two, in his wife's absences in pursuit of health, he had heard little of her apprehensions. Marian's own disinclination for a college career had, from the beginning, seemed to him to interpose an insurmountable barrier to parental guidance in that direction.
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