e
brightness of its own green sward and the luxuriance of its wild
woodland, from the contiguity of overhanging mountains, and from the
beauty of Lovel Tarn, a small lake belonging to the property, studded
with little islands, each of which is covered with its own thicket
of hollies, birch, and dwarfed oaks. The house itself is poor, ill
built, with straggling passages and low rooms, and is a sombre,
ill-omened looking place. When Josephine Murray was brought there
as a bride she thought it to be very sombre and ill-omened; but she
loved the lakes and mountains, and dreamed of some vague mysterious
joy of life which was to come to her from the wildness of her
domicile.

I fear that she had no other ground, firmer than this, on which to
found her hopes of happiness. She could not have thought Lord Lovel
to be a good man when she married him, and it can hardly be said that
she loved him. She was then twenty-four years old, and he had counted
double as many years. She was very beautiful, dark, with large, bold,
blue eyes, with hair almost black, tall, well made, almost robust, a
well-born, brave, ambitious woman, of whom it must be acknowledged
that she thought it very much to be the wife of a lord. Though our
story will be concerned much with her sufferings, the record of her
bridal days may be very short. It is with struggles that came to
her in after years that we shall be most concerned, and the reader,
therefore, need be troubled with no long description of Josephine
Murray as she was when she became the Countess Lovel. It is hoped
that her wrongs may be thought worthy of sympathy,--and may be felt
in some sort to atone for the ignoble motives of her marriage.

The Earl, when he found his bride, had been living almost in solitude
for a twelvemonth. Among the neighbouring gentry in the lake country
he kept no friendly relations. His property there was small, and his
character was evil. He was an English earl, and as such known in
some unfamiliar fashion to those who know all earls; but he was a
man never seen in Parliament, who had spent the greater part of his
manhood abroad, who had sold estates in other counties, converting
unentailed acres into increased wealth, but wealth of a kind much
less acceptable to the general English aristocrat than that which
comes direct from land. Lovel Grange was his only remaining English
property, and when in London he had rooms at an hotel. He never
entertained, and he never acce