CHAPTER XVII.
To the fears already possessing Lady Barbara a new one had now been added, freezing her blood and leaving her prostrate and helpless, like a plant stricken by an icy blast.
There had been no sleep for her after Martha's revelations regarding the presence of Felix in town, and turn as she would on her pillow, she could not escape the dread of one hideous possibility--her meeting him face to face, uncovering to his penetrating gaze her shame.
That he had had any other purpose in pursuing her across the sea than to humiliate and punish her, she did not believe.

No man, certainly no man as proud as her husband, would forgive a woman who had trailed his ancestral name in the mud, and made his family life a byword in clubs and drawing-rooms.

That Martha believed he could still love her was natural.

Such good souls, women of the people, who had always led restrained and wholesome lives, would believe nothing else, but not a woman of her own class.

She had only to recall a dozen instances where the bonds of marriage had been broken, with all the attendant scandal and misery, to be convinced of what would befall her were she and Felix to meet.
Her one hope was that her husband, baffled in his search, had left the city, and that neither Martha nor Stephen would ever see him again.
Their inability to find him of late might mean that he had given up the search, having found no trace of her during all the months in which he had been trying to find her.