years and infirmities grew upon
him, he was contented at least to have secured a faithful friend and
an anxious nurse. Still a marriage of this sort was not blessed:
Templeton's vanity was wounded; his temper, always harsh, was soured;
he avenged his affront by a thousand petty tyrannies; and, without a
murmur, Alice perhaps in those years of rank and opulence suffered more
than in all her wanderings, with love at her heart and her infant in her
arms.

Evelyn was to be the heiress to the wealth of the banker. But the
_title_ of the new peer!--if he could unite wealth and title, and set
the coronet on that young brow! This had led him to seek the alliance
with Lumley. And on his death-bed, it was not the secret of Alice, but
that of Mary Westbrook and his daughter, which he had revealed to his
dismayed and astonished nephew, in excuse for the apparently unjust
alienation of his property, and as the cause of the alliance he had
sought.

While her husband, if husband he might be called, lived, Alice had
seemed to bury in her bosom her regret--deep, mighty, passionate, as it
was--for her lost child, the child of the unforgotten lover, to whom,
through such trials, and amid such new ties, she had been faithful from
first to last. But when once more free, her heart flew back to the
far and lowly grave. Hence her yearly visits to Brook-Green; hence her
purchase of the cottage, hallowed by memories of the dead. There, on
that lawn, had she borne forth the fragile form, to breathe the soft
noontide air; there, in that chamber, had she watched and hoped, and
prayed and despaired; there, in that quiet burial-ground, rested the
beloved dust! But Alice, even in her holiest feelings, was not selfish:
she forbore to gratify the first wish of her heart till Evelyn's
education was sufficiently advanced to enable her to quit the
neighbourhood; and then, to the delight of Aubrey (who saw in Evelyn a
fairer, and nobler, and purer Eleanor), she came to the solitary spot,
which, in all the earth, was the _least_ solitary to her!

And now the image of the lover of her youth--which during her marriage
she had _sought_, at least, to banish--returned to her, and at times
inspired her with the only hopes that the grave had not yet transferred
to heaven! In relating her tale to Aubrey or in conversing with Mrs.
Leslie, whose friendship she still maintained, she found that both
concurred in thinking that this obscure and wandering Butler, so sk