out of the "Nabob" espousing his
long-remembered child, Winifred, and the consequent salvation of her
father, seemed too romantic to be believed. Yet this man proved himself
duly accredited by his principal, and exercised his power already with
severity. The fine old house of Talylynn, a mansion rising close to a
small beautiful lake skirted by an antique park with many deer, was
already almost prepared for the reception of the "squire from abroad."
Meanwhile--what most excited the ill-will of the tenantry--this odious
persecutor of the all-beloved John Bevan had also furbished up a neat
old house adjoining the park gate, as a residence for himself; while
poor Bevan's farm-house of Llaneol was suffered to fall into ruinous
decay--the new steward even neglecting to keep it weather-tight.

Thus decayed, and almost ruinous, it seemed more in harmony with the
fortunes of the ever resigned and patient man. But his less placid dame,
after losing the services of Winifred, had fallen into a peevish sort of
despondency, as the father, missing her society, and its finer species
of consolation, had sunk into a more placid apathy.

David had received the hint of her possible self-devotion to the coming
"squire" with very little philosophy, little temper, and no allowance
for the feelings of an only daughter expecting to see a white-headed,
fond father, dragged from his home to a jail. He had been incensed; he
had wronged her by imputations of sordid motives--of pride, of contempt
for _himself_ as a beggar; and at last broke from her in sullen
resentment, after requiring her to bring all his letters, at their next
interview, which was to be a farewell one. And now she was bringing
every thing she had received from him, in sad obedience to this angry
demand. Nor was all his wrath, his injustice, and his despair, really
unacceptable to her secret heart. She would not have had him patient
under even the prospective possibility of her marrying another.

But his manner at this meeting announced a change in his whole
sentiments.

His very first words, (cold, yet kind, but how altered in tone!) with
his constrained deportment, expressed his acquiescence in her purpose,
whether pride, jealousy, or a juster estimate of her filial virtue, had
induced the stern resolve.

Winifred had never known the full strength of her own passion till now!
The idea of an early eternal end to their ungratified loves, which had
for some time become famil