brother's house; and behold, it was done!

But even here there was an obstacle--one last exasperating
obstacle--still in the way.

If she was known at the inn by any name at all, it was by the name of
Mrs. Silvester. A letter addressed to "Mrs. Arnold Brinkworth" would
probably not be taken in at the door; or if it was admitted and if
it was actually offered to her, she might decline to receive it, as a
letter not addressed to herself. A man of readier mental resources would
have seen that the name on the outside of the letter mattered little or
nothing, so long as the contents were read by the person to whom they
were addressed. But Geoffrey's was the order of mind which expresses
disturbance by attaching importance to trifles. He attached an absurd
importance to preserving absolute consistency in his letter, outside and
in. If he declared her to be Arnold Brinkworth's wife, he must direct
to her as Arnold Brinkworth's wife; or who could tell what the law might
say, or what scrape he might not get himself into by a mere scratch of
the pen! The more he thought of it, the more persuaded he felt of his
own cleverness here, and the hotter and the angrier he grew.

There is a way out of every thing. And there was surely a way out of
this, if he could only see it.

He failed to see it. After dealing with all the great difficulties, the
small difficulty proved too much for him. It struck him that he might
have been thinking too long about it--considering that he was not
accustomed to thinking long about any thing. Besides, his head was
getting giddy, with going mechanically round and round the tree. He
irritably turned his back on the tree and struck into another path: