. But Lady Annabel had not
less discovered that, in the ardent and susceptible temperament of
Venetia, means were offered by which the heart might be trained not
only to cope with but overpower the intellect. With great powers of
pleasing, beauty, accomplishments, a sweet voice, a soft manner, a
sympathetic heart, Lady Annabel was qualified to charm the world; she
had contrived to fascinate her daughter. She had inspired Venetia with
the most romantic attachment for her: such as rather subsists
between two female friends of the same age and hearts, than between
individuals in the relative situations which they bore to each other.
Yet while Venetia thus loved her mother, she could not but also
respect and revere the superior being whose knowledge was her guide on
all subjects, and whose various accomplishments deprived her secluded
education of all its disadvantages; and when she felt that one so
gifted had devoted her life to the benefit of her child, and that
this beautiful and peerless lady had no other ambition but to be
her guardian and attendant spirit; gratitude, fervent and profound,
mingled with admiring reverence and passionate affection, and together
formed a spell that encircled the mind of Venetia with talismanic
sway.

Under the despotic influence of these enchanted feelings, Venetia
was fast growing into womanhood, without a single cloud having ever
disturbed or sullied the pure and splendid heaven of her domestic
life. Suddenly the horizon had become clouded, a storm had gathered
and burst, and an eclipse could scarcely have occasioned more terror
to the untutored roamer of the wilderness, than this unexpected
catastrophe to one so inexperienced in the power of the passions as
our heroine. Her heaven was again serene; but such was the effect
of this ebullition on her character, so keen was her dread of again
encountering the agony of another misunderstanding with her mother,
that she recoiled with trembling from that subject which had so often
and so deeply engaged her secret thoughts; and the idea of her father,
associated as it now was with pain, mortification, and misery, never
rose to her imagination but instantly to be shunned as some unhallowed
image, of which the bitter contemplation was fraught with not less
disastrous consequences than the denounced idolatry of the holy
people.

Whatever, therefore, might be the secret reasons which impelled Lady
Annabel to shroud the memory of the lost parent