gone for a year, she would still be on the Continent. If he should
meet her perhaps the affair would come on again: she caught herself
musing over this. But he brought back no such appearance, and,
seeing him after an interval, she was struck afresh with his jilted
and wasted air. She didn't like it--she resented it. A little more
and she would have said that that was no way to treat so faithful a
man.

They all went up to town in March, and on one of the first days of
April she saw Mrs. Churchley in the Park. She herself remained
apparently invisible to that lady--she herself and Beatrice and
Muriel, who sat with her in their mother's old bottle-green landau.
Mrs. Churchley, perched higher than ever, rode by without a
recognition; but this didn't prevent Adela's going to her before the
month was over. As on her great previous occasion she went in the
morning, and she again had the good fortune to be admitted. This
time, however, her visit was shorter, and a week after making it--the
week was a desolation--she addressed to her brother at Madrid a
letter containing these words: "I could endure it no longer--I
confessed and retracted; I explained to her as well as I could the
falsity of what I said to her ten months ago and the benighted purity
of my motives for saying it. I besought her to regard it as unsaid,
to forgive me, not to despise me too much, to take pity on poor
PERFECT papa and come back to him. She was more good-natured than
you might have expected--indeed she laughed extravagantly. She had
never believed me--it was too absurd; she had only, at the time,
disliked me. She found me utterly false--she was very frank with me
about this--and she told papa she really thought me horrid. She said
she could never live with such a girl, and as I would certainly never
marry I must be sent away--in short she quite loathed me. Papa