ds, penetrated towards his melancholy
and guilty home.

Two years had now passed since the decisive event which had forever
separated Marston from her who had loved him so devotedly and so fatally;
two years to him of disappointment, abasement, and secret rage; two years
to her of gentle and heart-broken submission to the chastening hand of
heaven. At the end of this time she died. Marston read the letter that
announced the event with a stern look, and silently, but the shock he
felt was terrific. No man is so self-abandoned to despair and
degradation, that at some casual moment thoughts of amendment--some
gleams of hope, however faint and transient, from the distant
future--will not visit him. With Marston, those thoughts had somehow ever
been associated with vague ideas of a reconciliation with the being whom
he had forsaken--good and pure, and looking at her from the darkness and
distance of his own fallen state, almost angelic as she seemed. But she
was now dead; he could make her no atonement; she could never smile
forgiveness upon him. This long-familiar image--the last that had
reflected for him one ray of the lost peace and love of happier
times--had vanished, and henceforward there was before him nothing but
storm and fear.

Marston's embarrassed fortunes made it to him an object to resume the
portion of his income heretofore devoted to the separate maintenance of
his wife and daughter. In order to effect this it became, of course,
necessary to recall his daughter, Rhoda, and fix her residence once more
at Gray Forest. No more dreadful penalty could have been inflicted upon
the poor girl--no more agonizing ordeal than that she was thus doomed to
undergo. She had idolized her mother, and now adored her memory. She knew
that Mademoiselle de Barras had betrayed and indirectly murdered the
parent she had so devotedly loved; she knew that that woman had been the
curse, the fate of her family, and she regarded her naturally with
feelings of mingled terror and abhorrence, the intensity of which was
indescribable.

The few scattered friends and relatives, whose sympathies had been moved
by the melancholy fate of poor Mrs. Marston, were unanimously agreed that
the intended removal of the young and innocent daughter to the polluted
mansion of sin and shame, was too intolerably revolting to be permitted.
But each of these virtuous individuals unhappily thought it the duty of
the others to interpose; and with a running