nter day she knew it, if a judgment may be formed from
her face, and attitude of despair, when she alighted from the carriage on
the afternoon of her marriage-day. It was not the traces of tears which
won the sympathy of the old butler who stood at the open door. The
bridegroom jumped out of the carriage and walked away. The bride
alighted, and came up the steps alone, with a countenance and frame
agonized and listless with evident horror and despair. The old servant
longed to offer his arm to the young, lonely creature, as an assurance of
sympathy and protection. From this shock she certainly rallied, and
soon. The pecuniary difficulties of her new home were exactly what a
devoted spirit like hers was fitted to encounter. Her husband bore
testimony, after the catastrophe, that a brighter being, a more
sympathising and agreeable companion, never blessed any man's home. When
he afterwards called her cold and mathematical, and over-pious, and so
forth, it was when public opinion had gone against him, and when he had
discovered that her fidelity and mercy, her silence and magnanimity,
might be relied on, so that he was at full liberty to make his part good,
as far as she was concerned.

'Silent she was even to her own parents, whose feelings she magnanimously
spared. She did not act rashly in leaving him, though she had been most
rash in marrying him.'

Not all at once did the full knowledge of the dreadful reality into which
she had entered come upon the young wife. She knew vaguely, from the
wild avowals of the first hours of their marriage, that there was a
dreadful secret of guilt; that Byron's soul was torn with agonies of
remorse, and that he had no love to give to her in return for a love
which was ready to do and dare all for him. Yet bravely she addressed
herself to the task of soothing and pleasing and calming the man whom she
had taken 'for better or for worse.'

Young and gifted; with a peculiar air of refined and spiritual beauty;
graceful in every movement; possessed of exquisite taste; a perfect
companion to his mind in all the higher walks of literary culture; and
with that infinite pliability to all his varying, capricious moods which
true love alone can give; bearing in her hand a princely fortune, which,
with a woman's uncalculating generosity, was thrown at his feet,--there
is no wonder that she might feel for a while as if she could enter the
lists with the very Devil himself, and fight wi