"I don't know. I can't tell. I'm almost afraid to turn my thoughts to the third volume"--with a quick impatient sigh. "I hope it will not end as it did with the Greenes of Green Park. If it does that will be a precious bad look-out, Lottchen, for you, for me, and for the boys--precious bad!"
"The Greenes of Green Park--the people in that pew near us in church, who used to be near us--the tall good-looking man with the glasses, and the pretty lady with the golden hair? Oh, I know! Tell me about them, Polly; how did they end?"
"Sir James Hannen," says Polly shortly; "that's how they ended. And nobody knew anything, even suspected anything, until the very last. They were the model couple of the whole country. Grandison Greene he used to be called, though his real name was Adolphus; but he was named Grandison, after a very courteous old swell in some book or other, on account of the fascinating elegance of his manners to the world at large and to his wife in particular. You never saw anything like their picturesque devotion to each other; they seemed to walk through matrimony in a sort of courtly minuet; and I've heard Lady Crawford tell auntie that it would just bring tears to your eyes to see that man shawl his wife in the cloak-room after a concert or dance. And this, my dear, went on for years and years, until one morning Mrs. Greene ran home to her mamma--she was a Miss Pakenham of Clare Abbey--and said she couldn't stand it any longer. And then it all came out in the Courts, for she refused to return to him, and he sued her publicly to make her do so, for a restitution of something or other--I forget the legal way of putting it. Any way, it came out that they simply loathed each other, and that Grandison had led the unfortunate woman the life of a fiend behind the scenes."
"It came out that, when he was wrapping her up so tenderly before every one, he used to pinch her poor arm until she was ready to scream with pain, but daren't; that he used to stealthily crunch her poor little foot when he was bending lovingly over her or bowing her out of the room; that he used to run pins into her flesh when he was adjusting a flower or knot of ribbons on her shoulder. You never heard such revelations. Aunt Jo hid all the papers at the time; but Bob and I found them, and read everything. He was a regular Bluebeard; and the very first evening I saw Armstrong offer his arm to Addie to bring her in to dinner, and the sort of shy shivery way she took it, made me think on the instant of Grandison Greene and his--"