"Dear madam, I wonder you have ever been able to bear to have me near you. His daughter!--_his_ daughter!"
"I thought we had settled long ago, Susan, that your services to me and mine, and your love for the children, must always win my gratitude and----"
"Dear madam, I know how good you are. I know how you took me out of the lowest depths of misery, just as no one else would have done. But if I am to bring trouble on you by staying here, if he, my father, is to bring more trouble on you, I would rather run away and hide myself, and never look upon your face again."
"Do not say so, Susan; let us trust in God, and He will protect us. Your father, if he recognised me, which I doubt, is very unlikely to come forward when a serious charge might be brought against him. It was a great shock at first for me to see him; but let us dismiss it from our minds now, and do not let us speak of it to anyone but Mr. Arundel. Certainly not to Mrs. Falconer."
"Very well, dear madam, I will do all you desire me," Susan said, and clasping little Joy in her arms, she turned away.
There was a lull in the storm as soon as the two Whig candidates were elected to represent the city of Bristol, and Mr. Hart-Davis withdrew quietly from the contest. The undercurrent, it is true, was still muttering and murmuring of evil times to come, and all thinking men who looked below the surface knew that it would but need a spark to kindle a great fire in Bristol, and that much wisdom, firmness, and decision, would be needed amongst the rulers.
Joyce Arundel, in her happy home life, soon lost the sense of insecurity, which after that memorable drive from Fair Acres, had at first haunted her.
Falcon's lessons, and the interest she felt in his rapid advancement, engrossed her every morning when her household duties were over; and then she would pace up and down the garden overlooking the city, with her baby in her arms, while Lota and Lettice played on the wide expanse of even, if rather smoke-dried, turf, which sloped down from the terrace walk at the back of the house, and tell herself a hundred times that no wife or mother in England was happier than she was.
The early married life of a mother whose chief interests centre in her own home, and who knows no craving for anything that lies beyond, is happy indeed. As years pass and her children vanish, and the sweetness of entire dependence on her ceases of necessity with infancy and childhood, the mother, weary with the battle of life, encompassed with difficulties, and overburdened with requirements which the failing strength of advancing years makes it hard to fulfil, can turn back to that fair oasis in her pilgrimage, when the children were with her day and night, when her hand had power to soothe a childish trouble, and her voice charm away a little pain or disappointment, or add, by her sympathy in joys as well as in sorrows, zest to all those simple pleasures in which children delight.