ou knowest--not hers--not that woman's--but
mine! all mine! My baby's father!--my Cuthbert--my own husband!"

"Oh past! past the sweet times that I remember well!
Alas that such a tale my heart can tell!
Ah, how I trusted him! what love was mine!
How sweet to feel his arms about me twine,
And my heart beat with his! What wealth of bliss
To hear his praises; all to come to this,--
That now I durst not look upon his face,
Lest in my heart that other thing have place--
That which men call hate!"

CHAPTER VIII.

"Nonsense, Elise! She is but a child, and I beg you will not
prematurely magnify her into a woman. There are so few unaffected,
natural children in this generation, that it is as refreshing to
contemplate our little girl's guileless purity and ingenuous
simplicity, as to gaze upon cool green meadows on a sultry, parching
August day. Keep her a child, let her alone."

Mr. Hargrove wiped his spectacles with his handkerchief, and replaced
them on his Roman nose with the injured air of a man who, having been
interrupted in some favourite study to take cognizance of an
unexpected, unwelcome, and altogether unpleasant fact, majestically
refuses to inspect, and dogmatically waves it aside, as if to ignore
were to annihilate.

"Now, Peyton, for a sensible man (to say nothing of the astute
philosopher and the erudite theologian), you certainly do indulge in
the most remarkable spasms of wilful, obstinate, premeditated
blindness. You need not stare so desperately at that page, for I
intend to talk to you, and it is useless to try to snub either me or
my facts. Regina is young, I know, not quite fourteen, but she is
more precocious, more mature, than many girls are at sixteen; and you
seem to forget that, having always associated with grown people, she
has imbibed their ideas and caught their expressions, instead of the
more juvenile forms of thought and speech usual in children who live
among children. She has as far outgrown jumping-ropes as you have
tops and kites, and has no more relish for fairy tales than your
reverence has for base-ball, or my Bishop here for marbles. Suppose
last October I had sprinkled a paper of lettuce-seed in the open
border of the garden, and on the same day you had sown a lot of
lettuce in the hot-beds against the brick wall, where all the
sunshine falls: would you refuse your crisp,