d what I have no assurance that I would not
have found myself, to a far greater extent than either of them--a slave
to a false code of honour."

Harry sat down, haggard, dispirited, half-desperate. His mother made no
reply. All the rest of the day she walked about the house like a
restless spirit; half the night she paced up and down her chamber
softly, lest Harry should hear her, and come in again, and begin to
caress her; for she could not endure Harry's kisses now--they were like
Joanna Crawfurd's smiles.

Was Harry quarrelling with his father's memory? It was a ghastly
sacrilege to her; yet might he not arrive at cursing in his heart, even
while he was grasping the devil within him by the throat? What had it
not cost him? First, his young love and the cream of his happiness; and
now his paternal acres, and his position among the independent,
influential gentlemen of his native county. He might not value the last
in his present fever and rashness, but he would weigh it more justly
hereafter. The moorland inheritance was not of great money purchase, but
it had descended to its possessors through long generations. It was
hallowed by venerable associations. The name and the property together
were of some importance in this nook of the south. Harry's father had a
family affection for his _place_, and, doubtless, Harry entertained it
also, undeveloped as yet, but to grow and acquire full maturity one day,
addressing him at every pensive interval with a vain craving and
yearning. And, again, in the confusion and distraction of Mrs.
Jardine's feelings, there was her sister Anne haunting her dreams, and
reproaching her with having forgotten her; and lastly, one verse in her
well-worn Bible was constantly standing out before her aching eyes in
letters of fire, and shining into her rebellious but scared heart, "I
will have mercy and not sacrifice."

It is one thing to have been Christians all our lives, drawn along by a
current, only broken by comparatively trivial, every-day temptations,
contests and sacrifices, and another thing to wrestle with a decree that
all at once confronts and contradicts a master-passion, a deeply-founded
verdict, a strongly-rooted opinion whose overthrow will shake the entire
framework of our lives.

Mrs. Jardine descended the stairs the next morning very pale and
exhausted, and for the first time (though she was a widow by a
peculiarly sorrowful visitation), with a certain wistful air which Har