"Well! if all we do is to come into broad daylight!" was her horrified
mental ejaculation.

The veil of life was about to be lifted for these ladies. They found
Arabella in her room, crying like an unchastened school-girl; and their
first idea was one of intense condemnation--fresh offences on the part of
Mrs. Chump being conjectured. Little by little Arabella sobbed out what
she had heard that day from Mr. Powys.

After the first stupor Adela proposed to go to her father instantly, and
then suggested that they should all go. She continued talking in random
suggestions, and with singular heat, as if she conceived that the
sensibility of her sisters required to be aroused. By moving and acting,
it seemed to her that the prospect of a vast misery might be expunged,
and that she might escape from showing any likeness to Arabella's
shamefully-discoloured face. It was impossible for her to realize grief
in her own bosom. She walked the room in a nervous tremour, shedding a
note of sympathy to one sister and to the other. At last Arabella got
fuller command of her voice. When she had related that her father's
positive wish, furthered by the doctor's special injunction to obey it
scrupulously, was that they were not to go to him in London, and not to
breathe a word of his illness, but to remain at Brookfield entertaining
friends, Adela stamped her foot, saying that it was more than human
nature could bear.

"If we go," said Arabella, "the London doctor assured Mr. Powys that he
would not answer for papa's life."

"But, good heavens! are we papa's enemies? And why may Mr. Powys see him
if we, his daughters, cannot? Tell me how Mr. Powys met him and knew of