iage; death had not then annulled the
bond. He was of an ardent and sensual temperament, and quietly, under
the broad cloak of his doctrines, he indulged his constitutional
tendencies. Perhaps in this respect he was not worse than nine men out
of ten. But then he professed to be better than nine hundred thousand
nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a million! To a fault of
temperament was added the craft of hypocrisy, and the vulgar error
became a dangerous vice. Upon Mary Westbrook, the widow's daughter, he
gazed with eyes that were far from being the eyes of the spirit. Even
at the age of fourteen she charmed him; but when, after watching
her ripening beauty expand, three years were added to that age,
Mr. Templeton was most deeply in love. Mary was indeed lovely,--her
disposition naturally good and gentle, but her education worse than
neglected. To the frivolities and meannesses of a second-rate fashion,
inculcated into her till her father's death, had now succeeded the
quackeries, the slavish subservience, the intolerant bigotries, of a
transcendental superstition. In a change so abrupt and violent, the
whole character of the poor girl was shaken; her principles unsettled,
vague, and unformed, and naturally of mediocre and even feeble
intellect, she clung to the first plank held out to her in "that wide
sea of wax" in which "she halted." Early taught to place the most
implicit faith in the dictates of Mr. Templeton, fastening her belief
round him as the vine winds its tendrils round the oak, yielding to his
ascendency, and pleased with his fostering and almost caressing manner,
no confessor in Papal Italy ever was more dangerous to village virtue
than Richard Templeton (who deemed himself the archetype of the only
pure Protestantism) to the morals and heart of Mary Westbrook.

Mrs. Westbrook, whose constitution had been prematurely broken by long
participation in the excesses of London dissipation and by the reverse
of fortune which still preyed upon a spirit it had rather soured than
humbled, died when Mary was eighteen. Templeton became the sole friend,
comforter, and supporter of the daughter.

In an evil hour (let us trust not from premeditated villany),--an hour
when the heart of one was softened by grief and gratitude, and the
conscience of the other laid asleep by passion, the virtue of Mary
Westbrook was betrayed. Her sorrow and remorse, his own fears of
detection and awakened self-reproach, occasioned Te