The Evil Genius: A Domestic Story — page 158: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE EVIL GENIUS. 147 other people’s children,” she said, ‘if you were a married man, Ah, your time will come yet—I mean your wife will come.” He answered this sadly. ‘‘ My time has gone by. I have never had the opportunities that have been granted to some fa- vored men.” He thought of the favored man who had married Mrs. Ormond. Was her husband worthy of his happiness? ‘‘ Is Mr. Ormond with you at this place?’ the captain asked. Serious issues depended on the manner in which this question was answered. For one moment, and for one moment only, Mrs. Presty hesitated. Then (in her daughter’s interests, of course) she put Catherine in the position of a widow, in the least blamable of all possible ways, by honestly owning the truth. ‘¢There is no Mr. Ormond,” she said. ‘Your daughter is a widow ?” cried the captain, pe~fectly un- able to control his delight at that discovery. ‘¢ What else should she be?’ Mrs. Presty replied, facetiously. What else, indeed! If ‘‘no Mr. Ormond” meant (as it must mean) that Mr. Ormond was dead, and if the beautiful mother of Kitty was an honest woman, what else could she be but a widow? Captain Bennydeck felt a little ashamed of his own jmpetuosity. Before he had made up his mind what to say next, the unlucky waiter (doomed to be a cause of disturbance on that day) appeared again. ‘*T beg your pardon, ma’am,” he said; ‘‘ the lady and gentle- man who have taken these rooms have just arrived.” Mrs. Presty got up in a hurry and cordially shook hands with the captain. Looking round, she took up the railway guide and her knitting left on the table. Was there anything else left about? There was nothing to be seen. Mrs. Presty crossed the passage to her daughter’s bedroom, to hurry the packing. Cap- tain Bennydeck went down-stairs, on his way back tothe yacht. In the hall of the hotel he passed the lady and gentleman— and of course noticed the lady. She was little and dark, and would have been pretty if she had not looked ill and out of spirits. What would he have said, what would he have done, if he had known that those two strangers were Randal Linley’s brother and Roderick Westerfield’s daughter ? CHAPTER XXXVI. MR. AND MRS. HERBERT. THE stealthy influence of distrust fastens its hold on the mind by slow degrees. Little by little it reaches its fatal end, and discuises delusion successfully under the garb of truth Day after day the false conviction grew on Sydney’s mind ‘that Herbert Linley was comparing the life he led now with the happier life which he remembered at Mount Morven. Day after day her unreasoning fear contemplated the time when Herbert Linley would leave her friendless, in a world that had no place in it for women like herself. Delusion—fatal delusion that looked like truth! Morally weak as he might be, the man whom she feared to trust had not yet entirely lost the sense which birth and breeding had firmly fastened in him—the sense COMNICELOO S (C©) im