But how if Everard resisted such tendencies?
Was he in truth capable of respecting her individuality?
Or would his strong instinct of lordship urge him to direct his wife as a dependent, to impose upon her his own view of things?
She doubted whether he had much genuine sympathy with woman's emancipation as she understood it.

Yet in no particular had her convictions changed; nor would they change.

She herself was no longer one of the 'odd women'; fortune had--or seemed to have--been kind to her; none the less her sense of a mission remained.
No longer an example of perfect female independence, and unable therefore to use the same language as before, she might illustrate woman's claim of equality in marriage .-- If her experience proved no obstacle.
* * * Next morning, as had been agreed, they met at some distance from Seascale, and spent two or three hours together.

There was little danger in observation unless by a casual peasant; for the most part their privacy could not have been more secure in a locked chamber.

Lest curiosity should be excited by his making inquiries at the hotel, Barfoot proposed to walk over to Gosforth, the nearest town, this afternoon, and learn where the registrar for the locality of Seascale might be found.