be very sad if an entire rupture between
herself and her parents should have been created. She would be true to
her husband; as true as a part must be to the whole, as the heart must
to the brain. They two were, and ever would be, one. But if her mother
could be spared to her, if she could be saved from a lasting quarrel
with her mother, it would be so much to her! Tears came into the eyes
even of the old man as he assented; and her husband swore to her that
for her sake he would forgive every injury from any one bearing the name
of Bolton when all this should be over.

A day was therefore fixed, and a note was written, and on the last day
of February she and her baby and her nurse were taken over to Puritan
Grange. In the meantime telegrams at a very great cost had been flying
backwards and forwards between Cambridge and Sydney. William and Robert
Bolton had determined among them that, at whatever expense to the
family, the truth must be ascertained; and to this the old banker had
assented. So far they were right, no doubt. If the daughter and sister
was not in truth a wife,--if by grossest, by most cruel ill-usage she
had been lured to a ruin for which there could be no remedy in this
world,--it would be better that the fact should be known at once, so
that her life might be pure though it could never again be bright. But
it was strange that, with all these Boltons, there was a desire, an
anxiety, to prove the man's guilt rather than his innocence. Mrs. Bolton
had always regarded him as a guilty man,--though guilty of she knew not
what. She had always predicted misery from a marriage so distasteful to
her; and her husband, though he had been brought to oppose her and to
sanction the marriage, had, from the moment in which the sanction was
given, been induced by her influence to reject it. Robert Bolton, when
the charge was first made, when the letter from the woman was first
shown to him, had become aware that he had made a mistake in allowing
this trouble to come upon the family; and then, as from point to point
the evidence had been opened out to him, he had gradually convinced
himself that the son-in-law and brother-in-law, whom he had, as it
were, forced into the family, was a bigamist. There was present to them
all an intense desire to prove the man's guilt, which was startling to
all around who heard anything of the matter. Up to this time the Bolton
telegrams and the Caldigate telegrams had elicited two facts,-