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Updated: September 6, 2025
It was followed by a tap a single faint tap, no more on one of the panes of glass. They all three stood still. For a moment more nothing was audible. Then there was a heavy shock, as of something falling outside. Then a groan, then another interval of silence a long silence, interrupted no more. Turlington's arm dropped from Natalie. She drew back to her aunt.
In the ease of Turlington's house, the foreign merchants had drawn their bills on him for sums large in the aggregate, if not large in themselves; had long since turned those bills into cash in their own markets, for their own necessities; and had now left the money which their paper represented to be paid by their London correspondents as it fell due.
An outbreak between the two men appeared to be inevitable, when the sailing-master of the yacht joined his employer on deck, and directed Turlington's attention to a question which is never to be trifled with at sea, the question of wind and tide. The yacht was then in the Bristol Channel, at the entrance to Bideford Bay.
His complaint took the form of a protest against Turlington's jealousy, and an appeal for a reconsideration of the sentence which excluded him from Muswell Hill. Watching them from a distance, Turlington's suspicious eye detected the appearance of something unduly confidential in the colloquy between the two. Under cover of the company, he stole behind them and listened.
"Tell him, Amelia!" cried the two young ladies, with the headlong recklessness of the sex which only stops to think when the time for reflection has gone by. A vague sense of something wrong began to stir uneasily in Turlington's mind. "Don't let me hurry you," he said, "but if you really have anything to tell me " Miss Amelia summoned her courage, and began.
Half indignant, half terrified, at Turlington's roughness, Miss Lavinia rose to interfere. In a moment more he would have had two women to overpower instead of one, when a noise outside the window suddenly suspended the ignoble struggle. There was a sound of footsteps on the gravel-walk which ran between the house wall and the garden lawn.
Sir Joseph Graybrooke, taking Turlington's hand, led him eagerly to their host. The talk in the dining-room had turned on finance. Lord Winwood was not quite satisfied with some of his foreign investments; and Sir Joseph's "dear Richard" was the very man to give him a little sound advice. The three laid their heads together in a corner.
He nodded kindly to his nephew; and, declining to pursue the subject, moved away to another part of the room. Turlington's jealous distrust, wrought to the highest pitch of irritability for weeks past, instantly associated the words he had just heard with the words spoken by Launce in the boudoir, which had reminded him that he was not married to Natalie yet.
"Excuse me, Joseph. You managed it much more delicately than you suppose. You didn't drag Richard in by the head and shoulders in that way." "Lavinia! I began with Richard." "Joseph! your memory deceives you." Turlington's impatience broke through all restraint. "How did it end?" he asked. "Did you propose to her that we should be married in the first week of the New Year?"
In one instant he was out of his night-gown, in another he was on the bulwark, in a third he was gamboling luxuriously in sixty fathoms of salt-water. Turlington's eyes followed him with a reluctant, uneasy attention as he swam round the vessel, the only moving object in view.
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