d Henry in the parlor. His feelings had risen
to a happier key; and it was with some approach to cheerfulness, but
little answered in the looks or feelings of his children, that he
retired to his chamber at a late hour, where sleep soon came, with its
sweet oblivion, to repair his exhausted spirits, and to restore him to
the quiet of an easy mind.

CHAPTER XXXV.

MILDRED IN GRIEF.--SHE IS NEAR MAKING A DISCLOSURE.--A VISITOR ARRIVES
AT THE DOVE COTE.

"Then in that hour remorse he felt,
And his heart told him he had dealt
Unkindly with his child."--_Rogers._

On the following day Mildred confined herself to her chamber. She had
passed a sleepless night, and the morning found her a pale, anxious, and
distressed watcher of the slow approach of light. Her thoughts were busy
with the fate of Butler. This topic overwhelmed all other cares, and
struck deep and unmitigated anguish into her mind. The hints that had
been so indiscreetly dropped by her father, more than if the whole tale
had been told, had worked upon her imagination, and conjured up to her
apprehension the certain destruction of her lover. In her interview with
Lindsay, her emotions had been controlled by the extreme difficulty of
her situation. The fear of rousing in her father that deep and solemn
tone of passion, which had now become the infirmity of his mind, and
almost threatened to "deprive his sovereignty of reason," and of which
she was painfully aware, had subdued the strength of her own
feelings--so far, at least, as to inculcate a more seeming moderation
than, in other circumstances, she could have exhibited. It was the
struggle between filial affection and duty on the one side, and an
ardent, though tremblingly acknowledged, attachment on the other. The
course that she had previously determined to pursue, in reference to the
many earnest and assiduous efforts of Lindsay to persuade her from her
love, was steadily to persevere in the open acknowledgment of her
plighted vow, and endeavor to win her father's favor by a calm and
gentle expostulation; or to seek, in a respectful silence, the means of
averting the occasion of that gusty and moody outbreak of temper, which
the peculiar exacerbation of his mind was apt to make frequent. She
would have resorted to this silence in the late communion with Lindsay,
if he had not, with an unusual bitterness, denounced Arthur Butler as
the author of a hateful crime; a crime which she knew