or
the time in quite a different direction.

The ponies were brought out for Hugh and Mildred to take their
customary canter. The young heiress, for whom so much time and pains
were spent, looked ill; the delicate flush had vanished from her
cheek; she seemed languid, and cheerful only by effort. A moment after
they had gone, as Mrs. Kinloch closed the door, for it was a raw
November day, she saw and picked up a rudely-folded letter in the
hall. "Good-bye, Lucy Ransom," were the words she read. They were
enough. Mrs. Kinloch felt that her heart was struck by a bolt of
ice. "Poor, misguided, miserable girl!" she said. "Why did I not see
that something was wrong? I felt it, I knew it,--but only as one knows
of evil in a dream. Who can calculate the mischief that will come of
this? O God! to have my hopes of so many years ruined, destroyed, by a
wretch whose power and existence even I had not once thought of! Has
she drowned herself, or fled to the city to hide her disgrace? But if
this should be imagination merely! She may have run away with some
lubberly fellow from the factory, whom she was ashamed to marry at
home. But no! she was too sad last evening when she asked to go to her
grandmother's for a day. What if"--The thought coursed round her brain
like fire on a train of gunpowder,--flew quicker than words could
utter it; and the woman bounded to her bureau, as though with muscles
of steel. She clutched at the papers and bank-notes in her private
drawer, and looked and counted them over a dozen times before she
could satisfy herself. Her thin fingers nervously opened the packages
and folds,--the papers crackling as her eye glanced over them. They
were there; but not _all_. She pored over the mystery,--her
thoughts running away upon every side-avenue of conjecture, and as
often returning to the frightful, remediless fact before her. She was
faint with sudden terror. By degrees she calmed herself, wiped the
cold sweat from her forehead, smiled at her fright, and sat down
again, with an attempt at self-control, to look through the drawers
thoroughly. As she went on, the tremor returned, and before she had
finished the fruitless search her heart beat so as to stop her breath;
she gasped in an agony that the soul rarely feels more than once in
this life. She shut up the drawers, walked up and down the room,
noticed with a shudder her own changed expression as she passed before
the mirror, and strove in vain to give some o