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Updated: September 7, 2025
Quickly after this there were very many letters coming and going between the house in the Close and the ladies at Nuncombe Putney, and Hugh Stanbury and Brooke Burgess. The correspondent of Brooke Burgess was of course Miss Stanbury herself. The letters to Hugh and to Nuncombe Putney were written by Dorothy.
Could it be possible that a man who had known her Nora, who had undoubtedly loved her Nora, who had travelled all the way from London to Nuncombe Putney to ask Nora to be his wife, should within twelve months of that time have resolved to marry a woman whom he must have selected simply as being the most opposite to Nora of any female human being that he could find?
He had met Hugh, as the reader may perhaps remember, and had had some intercourse with the young man, which had not been quite agreeable to him, on the platform of the railway station at Exeter. And he had also heard something of the ladies at Nuncombe Putney during his short sojourn at the house of Mrs. Crocket. "My belief is, they are beggars," said Colonel Osborne.
This was a hard blow, and from that moment Dorothy believed that it would be expedient that she should return to Nuncombe Putney. The broth, however, was taken, while Dorothy sat by in silence. Only one word further was said that evening by Miss Stanbury about Brooke and his love affair. "There must be nothing more about this, Dorothy; remember that; nothing at all. I won't have it."
He had made his tour through the county, and returned to spend his two last nights at Miss Stanbury's house. When he came back Dorothy was still at Nuncombe, but she arrived in the Close the day before his departure. Her mother and sister had wished her to stay at Nuncombe.
It was perhaps the plainest characteristic of all the Stanburys that they were never wilfully dishonest. Ignorant, prejudiced, and passionate they might be. In her anger Miss Stanbury, of Exeter, could be almost malicious; and her niece at Nuncombe Putney was very like her aunt.
Well; I told myself more than once, when I was down at Nuncombe for instance, that I had no right to speak to you. What right can a poor devil like me have, who lives from hand to mouth, to ask such a girl as you to be his wife? And so I said nothing, though it was on my lips every moment that I was there."
"I don't suppose all this will make any difference to Mr. Gibson," said Miss Stanbury to her niece, on the morning after the receipt of Priscilla's note stating that the Trevelyans had left Nuncombe. Dorothy always blushed when Mr. Gibson's name was mentioned, and she blushed now. But she did not at all understand her aunt's allusion. "I don't know what you mean, aunt," she said.
Glascock, who was seated in an easy arm-chair close to the girl whom he was to make his wife on the morrow, and she was thinking, no doubt, of the visit which he had made to Nuncombe Putney, and of the first irretrievable step which she had taken when she told him that her love was given to another. That had been her Rubicon.
Burgess quarrelled with the Stanbury family, how Jemima quarrelled with her own family, how, when her father died, she went out from Nuncombe Putney parsonage, and lived on the smallest pittance in a city lodging, how her lover was untrue to her and did not marry her, and how at last he died and left her every shilling that he possessed.
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