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CHAPTER IX.

SAINT CECILIA REPRIMANDED.

THE usually joyous dinner-table of Redburn Hall was, on this evening of the 5th of November, 1850, singularly sad and silent. Constance was again confined to her room with a head-ache; Cécile, exhausted by the proceedings of the day, had not found strength to appear; Edward had stayed on at the Thornhills. The small party was thus reduced to three persons, not one of whom seemed in a very elated or conversable mood; but the sullen asperity of Lady Helen's manner, and the quiescent pensiveness into which our hero was continually relapsing, whether in consequence of the absence of his fair cousin, or of a smart blow on the head,

administered to him by our recent acquaintance Bill, showed as nought by the forlorn despondency of the master of the house. Never, in the memory of his oldest servant, had his ruddy countenance revealed any such symptoms of mental prostration, and his sole, but oftmuttered exclamation: "I never could have believed it!" marked that he was no less amazed at the cause, than they were at the traces of his internal anguish. At length the domestics retired, and his over-wrought feelings sought some relief in a freer expression.

"If five thousand pounds had been offered upon it, I would have taken it! To think that for six and fifty years have I been, man and boy, moving backwards and forwards upon that road to Glanford, at every hour of the day or night, and never met with an uncivil look until this blessed day! And now, here am I insulted, and hooted, and pelted in my own carriage, on my own land, almost at my very hall-door! I could not have believed it if I had read of it

in fifty papers !"

"Well but, my dear," observed Lady Helen, who, by the bye, if she were really anxious to soothe her husband's irritated feelings, was not,

on this occasion, peculiarly skilful or successful, "are you quite sure that you were recognised ?"

"Recognised! of course I was!" retorted he angrily; "I have already told you that I heard my name mentioned twenty times, and who else but me in the county would they hoot as a Papist now-a-days? I verily believe, that one fellow was hailing me as a cardinal, forsooth !"

"Come, Sir Charles," interposed his nephew, scarcely suppressing a smile, "I was nearer wearing a red cap than you were this afternoon. After all, you came in for the best part of it. If you had had such a rap on the head as I got, you might have some reason to sing out."

"I will tell you what it is, nephew," said Sir Charles, by no means responding to St. Edmunds's tone. "It is all a very good joke, I dare say, for you who have your station, and a most honourable one it is, in another part of the country. But mine is here; through life my object has been that it should remain creditable, and I cannot see it forfeited, day by day, with indifference. What appears to divert you so vastly may also amuse others, in a far

other spirit, and I am not at all prepared to become the laughing-stock of Lincolnshire, I can tell you."

"I wish that I could exactly make out what Cécile was doing there, contrary to her uncle's repeated orders," observed Lady Helen, ever anxious to bring back the conversation to what she conceived to be its main point.

What in life took

"Ah! that is exactly it. her there, and on this day of all others?" cried Sir Charles, emphatically striking the table with his fist. "Hadn't I desired her never to go near those Hawthornes again? Hasn't she vowed to me more than once, till she was black in the face, that she would never attempt any proselyting nonsense about here? came she there at all, I want to know ?"

How

"You will wait sometime till you hear, Sir Charles," remarked Lady Helen; "at least, if we are to abide by her account of the business. She will be careful not to show herself, I should say, until she thinks that other matters may have afforded some diversion to our present feelings."

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