more money?«
    »Did you not know that Mr. Grandcourt left me a letter on your wedding-day?
I am to have eight hundred a-year. He wishes me to keep Offendene for the
present, while you are at Diplow. But if there were some pretty cottage near the
park at Ryelands we might live there without much expense, and I should have you
most of the year, perhaps.«
    »We must leave that to Mr. Grandcourt, mamma.«
    »Oh, certainly. It is exceedingly handsome of him to say that he will pay
the rent for Offendene till June. And we can go on very well - without any
man-servant except Crane, just for out of doors. Our good Merry will stay with
us and help me to manage everything. It is natural that Mr. Grandcourt should
wish me to live in a good style of house in your neighbourhood, and I cannot
decline. So he said nothing about it to you?«
    »No; he wished me to hear it from you, I suppose.«
    Gwendolen in fact had been very anxious to have some definite knowledge of
what would be done for her mother, but at no moment since her marriage had she
been able to overcome the difficulty of mentioning the subject to Grandcourt.
Now, however, she had a sense of obligation which would not let her rest without
saying to him, »It is very good of you to provide for mamma. You took a great
deal on yourself in marrying a girl who had nothing but relations belonging to
her.«
    Grandcourt was smoking, and only said carelessly, »Of course I was not going
to let her live like a gamekeeper's mother.«
    »At least he is not mean about money,« thought Gwendolen, »and mamma is the
better off for my marriage.«
    She often pursued the comparison between what might have been, if she had
not married Grandcourt, and what actually was, trying to persuade herself that
life generally was barren of satisfaction, and that if she had chosen
differently she might now have been looking back with a regret as bitter as the
feeling she was trying to argue away. Her mother's dulness, which used to
irritate her, she was at present inclined to explain as the ordinary result of
women's experience. True, she still saw that she would »manage differently from
mamma;« but her management now only meant that she would carry her troubles with
spirit, and let none suspect them. By-and-by she promised herself that she
should get