"Enough! I understand,"--said Mrs. Cadwallader. "You shall
be innocent. I am such a blackamoor that I cannot smirch myself."
"I don't mean that it's of any consequence," said Sir James,
disliking that Mrs. Cadwallader should understand too much.
"Only it is desirable that Dorothea should know there are reasons why
she should not receive him again; and I really can't say so to her.
It will come lightly from you."
It came very lightly indeed. When Dorothea quitted Caleb and
turned to meet them, it appeared that Mrs. Cadwallader had stepped
across the park by the merest chance in the world, just to chat
with Celia in a matronly way about the baby. And so Mr. Brooke
was coming back? Delightful!--coming back, it was to be hoped,
quite cured of Parliamentary fever and pioneering. Apropos
of the "Pioneer"--somebody had prophesied that it would soon
be like a dying dolphin, and turn all colors for want of knowing
how to help itself, because Mr. Brooke's protege, the brilliant
young Ladislaw, was gone or going. Had Sir James heard that?
The three were walking along the gravel slowly, and Sir James,
turning aside to whip a shrub, said he had heard something of that sort.
"All false!" said Mrs. Cadwallader. "He is not gone, or going,
apparently; the `Pioneer' keeps its color, and Mr. Orlando Ladislaw
is making a sad dark-blue scandal by warbling continually with your
Mr.
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