,
where she had gone yachting with her uncle, Sir Thomas Heaton, the
great Lancashire coal-owner. Sometimes she addressed him as "Dearest,"
at others as "Beloved," usually signing herself "Your Own." So full
were they of the ardent passion characteristic of her that they held
me in amazement. It was passion developed under its most profound and
serious aspects; they showed the calm and thoughtful, not the
brilliant side of intellect.

In Ethelwynn's character the passionate and the imaginative were
blended equally and in the highest conceivable degree as combined with
delicate female nature. Those letters, although written to a man in
whose heart romance must long ago have been dead, showed how complex
was her character, how fervent, enthusiastic and self-forgetting her
love. At first I believed that those passionate outpourings were
merely designed to captivate the old gentleman for his money; but when
I read on I saw how intense her passion became towards the end, and
how the culmination of it all was that wild reproachful missive
written when the crushing blow fell so suddenly upon her.

Ethelwynn was a woman of extraordinary character, full of picturesque
charm and glowing romance. To be tremblingly alive to the gentle
impressions, and yet be able to preserve, when the prosecution of a
design requires it, an immovable heart, amidst even the most imperious
causes of subduing emotion, is perhaps not an impossible constitution
of mind, but it is the utmost and rarest endowment of humanity. I knew
her as a woman of highest mental powers touched with a melancholy
sweetness. I was now aware of the cause of that melancholy.

Yet it was apparent that the serious and energetic part of her
character was founded on deep passion, for after her sister's marriage
with the man she had herself loved and had threatened, she had
actually come there beneath their roof, and lived as her sister's
companion, stifling all the hatred that had entered her heart, and
preserving an outward calm that had no doubt entirely disarmed him.

Such a circumstance was extraordinary. To me, as to Ambler Jevons who
knew her well, it seemed almost inconceivable that old Mr. Courtenay
should allow her to live there after receiving such a wild
communication as that final letter. Especially curious, too, that Mary
had never suspected or discovered her sister's jealousy. Yet so
skilfully had Ethelwynn concealed her intention of revenge that both
husband