ss.

The faithless lady was of no particular family; an orphan daughter of an
admiral who educated her on his half-pay, and her conduct struck but at
the man whose name she bore.

After five years of marriage, and twelve of friendship, Sir Austin was
left to his loneliness with nothing to ease his heart of love upon save a
little baby boy in a cradle. He forgave the man: he put him aside as poor
for his wrath. The woman he could not forgive; she had sinned every way.
Simple ingratitude to a benefactor was a pardonable transgression, for he
was not one to recount and crush the culprit under the heap of his good
deeds. But her he had raised to be his equal, and he judged her as his
equal. She had blackened the world's fair aspect for him.

In the presence of that world, so different to him now, he preserved his
wonted demeanor, and made his features a flexible mask. Mrs. Doria Forey,
his widowed sister, said that Austin might have retired from his
Parliamentary career for a time, and given up gaieties and that kind of
thing; her opinion, founded on observation of him in public and private,
was, that the light thing who had taken flight was but a feather on her
brother's Feverel-heart, and his ordinary course of life would be
resumed. There are times when common men cannot bear the weight of just
so much. Hippias Feverel, one of his brothers, thought him immensely
improved by his misfortune, if the loss of such a person could be so
designated; and seeing that Hippias received in consequence free quarters
at Raynham, and possession of the wing of the Abbey she had inhabited, it
is profitable to know his thoughts. If the baronet had given two or three
blazing dinners in the great hall he would have deceived people
generally, as he did his relatives and intimates. He was too sick for
that: fit only for passive acting.

The nursemaid waking in the night beheld a solitary figure darkening a
lamp above her little sleeping charge, and became so used to the sight as
never to wake with a start. One night she was strangely aroused by a
sound of sobbing. The baronet stood beside the cot in his long black
cloak and travelling cap. His fingers shaded a lamp, and reddened against
the fitful darkness that ever and anon went leaping up the wall. She
could hardly believe her senses to see the austere gentleman, dead
silent, dropping tear upon tear before her eyes. She lay stone-still in a
trance of terror and mournfulness, mechanically