‘Why need you venture your health and your life in that infected air, amidst that mingled mass of houses and graves called a great city; surrounded by the smoke and pestilent vapours of every different trade and manufactory; when, here, you can have leisure, independence, solitude, or society as you will?’

Such was Sowerby's abrupt exclamation, on Mrs. Melbourne's first hinting the necessity of her returning to London. He then / proceeded, ‘You know that pretty little box called Woodbine Lodge, which you admired so much for its situation: it is mine, I lent it to young Mendlesham, who is just quitting it; so that I can let you have it, and I am sure if you would take it, it would be a blessed exchange. I obliged him with it, because his father was an old chum of mine, and I never ceased fretting, and wishing him out of it from the moment he got in it. He used it as a hunting lodge, but it would not be too small for two ladies; and there Matilda might have her harp, and you might have your books and drawings; it is only a walk across the park, so that I should be near enough sometimes to drop in upon you, and forget, in your society, the miserable forlorn condition of solitary man.’

Mrs. Melbourne easily saw into Sowerby's real motive for wishing her and Matilda to give up London; which was, by fixing them near him, to secure some compensation for the loss of Clara's society, whom he had vainly hoped to induce to live with him. The gentle nun, now her health was reestablished, considered every hour she spent away from her convent as a crime; and Sowerby saw himself about to be deprived, at once, of the little female society that had chased away the gloom from his solitary hearth, just as he began to acquire a taste for its charms.