by accusing Merthyr Powys; and with a little feeling of spite not unknown
to masculine dignity, he wrote to Merthyr's half-sister--"merely to
inquire, being aware that whatever he does you have been consulted on,
and the friends of this Miss Belloni are distressed by her absence."

The ladies of Brookfield were accustomed to their father's occasional
unpremeditated absences, and neither of them had felt an apprehension
which she could not dismiss, until one morning Mr. Powys sent up his card
to Arabella, requesting permission to speak with her alone.




CHAPTER XXVIII

Georgiana Ford would have had little claim among the fair saints to be
accepted by them as one of their order. Her reputation for coldness was
derived from the fact of her having stood a siege from Captain Gambier.
But she loved a creature of earth too well to put up a hand for saintly
honours. The passion of her life centred in devotion to her half-
brother. Those who had studied her said, perhaps with a touch of
malignity, that her religious instinct had its source in a desire to gain
some place of intercession for him. Merthyr had leaned upon it too often
to doubt the strength of it, whatever its purity might be. She, when
barely more than a child (a girl of sixteen), had followed him over the
then luckless Italian fields--sacrificing as much for a cause that she
held to be trivial, as he in the ardour of his half-fanatical worship.
Her theory was: "These Italians are in bondage, and since heaven permits
it, there has been guilt. By endurance they are strengthened, by
suffering chastened; so let them endure and suffer." She would cleave to