ank God for all that I have gained
By that high suffering."
Moncton Manes.

For many days Lord De Vayne seemed to be hovering between life and
death. The depression of his spirits weighed upon his frame, and
greatly retarded his recovery. That he, unconscious as he was of ever
having made an enemy--good and gentle to all--with no desire but to love
his neighbour as himself, and to devote such talents and such
opportunities as had been vouchsafed him to God's glory and man's
benefit;--that _he_ should have been made the subject of a disgraceful
wager, and the butt of an infamous experiment; that in endeavouring to
carry out this nefarious plan, any one should have been so wickedly
reckless, so criminally thoughtless;--this knowledge lay on his
imagination with a depression as of coming death. De Vayne had been but
little in Saint Werner's society, and had rarely seen any but his few
chosen friends; and that such a calamity should have happened in the
rooms and at the table of one of those friends,--that Kennedy, whom he
so much loved and admired, should be suspected of being privy to it;--
this fact was one which made De Vayne's heart sink within him with
anguish and horror, and a weariness of life.

And in those troubled waters of painful thought floated the broken
gleams of a golden phantasy, the rainbow-coloured memories of a secret
love. They came like a light upon the darkened waves, yet a light too
feeble to dissipate the under gloom. Like the phosphorescent flashes in
the sea at midnight, which the lonely voyager, watching with interest as
they glow in the white wake of the keel, guesses that they may be the
heralds of a storm,--so these bright reminiscences of happier days only
gave a weird beauty to the tumult of the sick boy's mind; and the
mother, as she sat by him night and day during the crisis of his
suffering, listened with a deeper anxiety for future trouble to the
delirious revelations of his love.

For Lady De Vayne had come from Other Hall to nurse her sick son. She
slept on a sofa in his sitting-room, and nursed him with such tenderness
as only a mother can. There was no immediate possibility of removing
him; deep, unbroken quiet was his only chance of life. The silence of
his sick-room was undisturbed save by the softest whispers and the
lightest footfalls, and the very undergraduates hushed their voices, and
checked their hasty steps as they passed in the echoing cloisters
underneath