Mary recovered to feel and to suffer. Are they not, at least with a woman, synonymous? Her eldest brother was apprenticed to a shoemaker in London, with strict injunctions from his father, night and day, to prosecute his inquiries about William Dale.

Old Lee and his second son, when they did meet beneath their own roof at work or at meals, like Trappists, exchanged but one sentence, which was invariably the same, namely, "Well, have you heard any tidings of him?" and the negative that ensued was followed by total silence. At the end of a year, poor Mary partially recovered her senses, but the profound melancholy that succeeded was even more heart-rending to all save the wretched father, who felt as grateful for his child's recovered reason as though she had been restored to him from the dead. With that delicacy of tact which genuine feeling always inspires, neither he nor her brother ever alluded to the past, nor did Mary; but whenever the former took her child upon his knee, the blood would rush into her cheeks and the tears into her eyes, and she would hurry away to the mechanical performance of some household work, or effort to achieve some long-missing comfort for the poor old man. Mary longed to know more of her own history than she could remember; every time she read that fatal and brutal letter (which, with the cunning of insanity, she had contrived to secure and secrete), her brain seemed to stereotype the words in fire. And this told her own individual history but too plainly; her only unsolved wonder was, how her father had become acquainted with it, and how he had borne it; and of this Madge Brindal, by degrees, informed her. As she recovered sufficiently again to employ herself, the benevolent Mrs. Stokes, feeling for her deplorable situation, and the decreasing comforts of her once happy and, for her sphere of life, affluent home, busied herself in procuring plain work for her. It was about fifteen months after the events recorded at the commencement of this chapter, that Lord and Lady de Clifford having come down to Blichingly for the shooting season, Mrs. Stokes made interest with Lady de Clifford's maid to employ Mary as a sempstress, which she did by giving her some frocks to make for little Julia. About seven o'clock of a fine September evening, Mary, having completed her work, put on a deep close bonnet, and taking a back

1

way through the fields, repaired with it to the Park. On arriving there Mrs. Frump politely requested she would rest herself in the housekeeper's room, although such hospitality was expressly contrary to her mistress's commands, from the circumstance of she herself being in the habit of paying frequent and impromptu visits to that domestic headquarters. Mary, however, declined this contraband and perilous invitation, and requested to be shown immediately into the presence of Lady de Clifford's maid, with whom her business was. Frump having rung the bell and desired a housemaid to conduct her up stairs to Beryl's workroom, she ascended the back stairs as noiselessly and quickly as possible. In crossing the music gallery, as she was turning into the corridor where the bedrooms were situated, her shawl was caught by the sharp corner of a pedestal; in turning to disengage it she beheld a bust of Lord de Clifford. It was with the greatest possible effort that she prevented herself from uttering a scream. At this sudden apparition of those features so deeply and fatally engraven upon her memory, she was on the point of asking the housemaid whose bust it was; but poor Mary had long felt as if the very sound of her own voice was to publish her shame, and the wish died away unspoken. "Come in," said Beryl, in reply to the housemaid's knock. "A young woman from the village, ma'am," said the latter, ushering in Mary, "who has brought home Miss Grimstone's frocks."

"Oh, you are very punctual, I must say," said Beryl, patronisingly, as she placed a half-finished cap she was making on a block before her; “very punctual indeed; and the work is very neat; extremely so," continued she, scrutinizing the tucks. “Do you think you would be able to braid a velvet frock, a vilet velvet with narrow gold Russian braid, for my young lady, against the beginning of next week?"

"I'll try, ma'am," said Mary, modestly.

"Well, I'll hexplain to you how it is to be done," said Beryl, opening the drawer of a wardrobe and taking out the velvet; "the lapels is to be-" so far had she got in her directions, when a loud voice was heard calling, "Beryl, Beryl."

Coming, my lord, directly," cried she, throwing down the velvet with a gesture of impatience. At the sound of that voice a shudder and a faintness came over

Mary Lee. Beryl prepared to leave the room, but, before she could do so, the door opened, and Lord de Clifford, in his shooting jacket and shoes, his gun under his arm, and a slip of paper in his hand, flung open the door. "Beryl!" said he, not perceiving Mary, who stood in the shadow of the wardrobe, her heart standing still as she tried to catch every sound of that voice, that seemed like a fiery serpent to be hissing through her brain; while Lord de Clifford's back being turned to her as he spoke to Beryl at the door, she could not at first distinguish his face.

“Beryl, Carlton is going to town this evening; send this by him to Howel and James's, and write yourself besides, telling them exactly the faults in the collars of the last shirts; they want more cutting out in the joining, or something; and put down the name of the satin you say I like for neckcloths; here, here's my list," and as he spoke he held it out to her; but before she could take it, Mary sprang forward and seized it, exclaiming, with a loud shriek and wild hysterical laugh, as she grasped Lord de Clifford's arm tightly, " So, William Dale, William Dale, I have found you at last; father, I have found him! George, I have found him! him, the real William; not the one who wanted to send me to the House of Correction. No, no! he has been properly punished; they have turned him to stone, and he stands in a corner of this house, looking so cold, and so ghastly, and so grand, but so terrible! His eyes look like petrified curses, but indeed I did not curse him. No, no, I did not; but that letter did, and here is another just like it; the same writing exactly, but the words won't stand still for me to read them. There, there," continued she, plunging it in her bosom; "there I'll hide it, for fear they should turn you to stone with it, as they did the other William; but he was false, and cruel, and deserved it. Let us go, William, let us go; don't stay here; the very air feels unkind in this place. We will go to the dell; there are fairies there, and they all know us, and we'll dance with them in the moonlight. Madge told me I should be revenged; and will it not be fine revenge to bury that stone William Dale in the Fairies' Bath? and when he cries to be taken out, the other little white round stones will mock and laugh at him, and tell him not to persecute them, but go to the House of Correction; ha! ha! ha!"

"D-n it, what the d-1 brought her here ?" said Lord de Clifford, frowning fearfully, and endeavouring to shake off the poor wretched girl; but madness was stronger than brute force, and she did not relax her grasp.

"Poor thing!" said Beryl, compassionately; "you must excuse her, my lord, she is subject to fits of insanity; for hers is a sad story: your lordship may have heard it perhaps. She is daughter to the most respectablest man in all the village, old Lee the carpenter. She has been cruelly used and deserted by some villain, about a year and a half ago, and she has never been in her right mind since."

"And what the deuse was she doing up here?" asked de Clifford, angrily, without evincing the slightest compunction for the scene of wretchedness before him.

66

Why, being very poor, I gave her some frocks to make for Miss Grimstone, and she brought them home, my lord, this evening."

66 I really think you might have found a person of less equivocal character to work for my daughter; but get her some water, for I believe she is fainting."

Poor Mary's head had indeed sunk exhausted upon the shoulder of her brutal and unfeeling destroyer. Beryl walked over to the washing-slab and filled out a glass of water; but Lord de Clifford's object being to get her out of the way, in order to try and intimidate Mary into going quietly home, he changed his genuine inhumanity into his mother's ever diplomatically successful suaviter in modo fortiter in re line of conduct, and when Beryl brought the water, he said in a pitying tone, "Poor girl! she seems so very weak, that I think wine would be better for her; go down and ask for some claret."

As Beryl closed the door, she could not help muttering to herself, "Well, I do declare it was too bad to talk about poor Mary's character, when she was lying quite mad, and nearly dead before him; but them there sort of profligate men, as every one knows he is, is so severe on us women; but it always was so, even in the Bible, for how wicked and spiteful Amnon was against Tamar; while no one ever heard of Joseph's saying a bad word of Mrs. Potiphar, though she richly deserved it; but men who behave themselves properly never speak ill of the women."

No sooner had Beryl

gone than Lord de Clifford

shook Mary rudely, and, calling her by the most opprobrious names, threatened to give her in charge to a constable if she did not instantly leave the house. This roused the poor girl into a sort of half reason, that filled her with a bitter and burning hatred of her cruel and fiendlike betrayer. "Know, woman, whom you are speaking to," cried he; "I am not William Dale that you rave about; I am Lord de Clifford, son to the owner of these broad lands, upon which you and your family are poor mean serfs."

Wounded pride is a necromancer that converts the strongest love into the strongest and most implacable hate; let no man, therefore, be surprised, when he has sharpened a woman's heart upon the whetstone of insult, if it becomes a two-edged sword and is pointed against himself. Mary Lee seemed changed as if by a magician's wand on the instant. No longer (even in madness) the soft, the gentle, the affectionate, the enduring, the forgiving victim, reason seemed to have returned to her as a gigantic and mighty weapon. She drew herself up to her full height, scorn quivered in her lip, hatred curdled her cheek, vengeance burned and lightened in her eyes: there she stood like an imbodied curse, as if her very breath had power to wither her betrayer; even he trembled beneath the loud, relentless, deliberate tone in which she spoke; every word that fell upon his ear seemed like a prophecy impelled by its own force to its own fulfilment. As William Dale, Mary still hoped, and, therefore, could have forgiven; but in the conviction that her seducer was Lord de Clifford, she felt the premeditation of the insult, the hopelessness, the irreparableness of the injury.

"You are Lord de Clifford," said she, slowly and distinctly, as she folded her arms and measured him with a scornful look from head to foot; "then listen to what you are. You are, in your own opinion, a great lord; in that of the world, your own great world, a pompous, proud, disagreeable man; in that of the poor, a sordid, avaricious tyrant, who promises great things in his speeches at elections, and does mean ones to every one sufficiently humble to allow him to do so with impunity and in mine, you are a cold, selfish, remorseless villain, whose dark deeds (despite this world's might, which is always right) will yet, and that at no far distant time, work out their own punishment."