this which made her so reluctant to pass the boundaries
of Oakhurst. It was this that embittered her whole life, and rendered it
one long humiliation.

These reflections served to concentrate the hopes and affections of this
woman so entirely around one object, that her love for Hope, which had
been an overwhelming passion, grew into that idolatry no man, whose life
was in the world, could answer to, for isolation was necessary to a
feeling of such cruel intensity.

As the hope of sharing his life and his honors gave way, doubts,
suspicions, and anxieties grew out of her inordinate love, and the
greatest sorrow to her on earth was the absence of her husband. It was
not alone that she missed his company, which was, in fact, all the world
to her; but, as he went more and more into the world, a terrible dread
seized upon her. What if he found, among all the highly born women who
received him so graciously, some one who, in the brightness of a happy
life, might make him regret the sacrifice he had made for her, the
terrible scenes he had gone through in order to obtain her? What if he
might yet come to wish her dead, as she sometimes almost wished herself!

In this way the love, which had flowed like a lava stream through that
woman's life, engendered its own curse, and her mind was continually
haunted by apprehensions which had no foundation, in fact, for, to this
day, Lord Hope loved her with deeper passion than he had ever given to
that better woman; but with him the distractions of statesmanship, and
the allurements of social life, were a resource from intense thought,
while she had so little beside himself.

She had striven to bind him to her by kindness to his child, until the
bright girl became, as it were, a part of himself, with whom it would be
death to part.

Is it strange, then, that this dream of uniting Clara to her only
brother should have been very sweet to the unhappy woman?

Lord Hope had been absent a whole month now, and even with the
excitement of her brother's presence, Rachael had found those four weeks
terribly long.

What would she do if that fair girl were separated from her entirely?
Then solitude would be terrible indeed!

But another anxiety came upon her by degrees. In what way would her
husband receive Hepworth Closs? How would he accept the position the two
persons out yonder were drifting into? Would he consent to a union which
even her partiality admitted as unsuitable, or would he