--death! Lord Elmwood, do you love this woman?"

"More than my life!" he replied, with the most heartfelt accents.

He then turned to Miss Milner.

"Can you say the same by him?"

She spread her hands over her eyes, and exclaimed, "Oh, heavens!"

"I believe you can say so," returned Sandford. "And in the name of God,
and your own happiness, since this is the state of you both, let me put
it out of your power to part?"

On which he opened his book and--married them.

Nevertheless, on that joyful day which restored her lost lover to her
hopes again, even on that very day after the ceremony was over, Miss
Milner--with all the fears, the superstition of her sex--felt an
excruciating shock when, looking on the ring Lord Elmwood had put upon
her finger in haste, she perceived it was a mourning-ring.

_IV.--Outcasts_

Alas! in seventeen years the beautiful, beloved Miss Milner was no
longer beautiful, no longer beloved, no longer virtuous.

Dorriforth, the pious, the good, the tender Dorriforth, was become a
hard-hearted tyrant.

Miss Woodley had grown old, but less with years than grief.

The boy Harry Rushbrook had become a man and the apparent heir of Lord
Elmwood's fortune, while his own daughter, his only child by his
once-adored Miss Milner, he refused ever to see again, in vengeance to
her mother's crime.

Sandford alone remained much as heretofore.

Lady Elmwood was a loved and loving bride seventeen years ago; now she
lay on her death-bed. At thirty-five "her course was run." After four
years of perfect happiness, Lord Elmwood was obliged to leave his wife
and child while he went to visit his large estates in the West Indies.
His voyage was tedious, his return delayed by serious illness, which a
too cautious fear of her uneasiness prompted him to conceal. He was away
three years.

It was no other than Lord Frederick Lawnly to whom Lady Elmwood
sacrificed her own and her husband's future peace; she did not, however,
elope with her paramour, but escaped to shelter herself in the most
dreary retreat, where she partook of no comfort but the still
unremitting friendship of Miss Woodley. Even her child she left behind,
that she might be under her father's protection. Conceive, then, how
sharp her agony was on beholding the child sent after her as the
perpetual outcast of its father. Lord Elmwood's love to his wife had
been extravagant--the effect of his hate was the same. Once more he met
Lord Frederi