love, affectionate confidence towards her parents; now all had been cast aside.  If her mother’s words were true, and bitterly she felt they were, that her conduct to St. Eval had been one continued falsehood, what would her parents feel when her intercourse with Lord Alphingham was discovered.  Lord Alphingham—­she shuddered as his name rose to her lips.  Her heart yearned with passionate intensity towards her mother, to hear her voice in blessing, to see her beaming smile, and feel her kiss of approbation, such as at Oakwood she had so often received:  she longed in utter wretchedness for them.  That night she was wilfully to cast them off for ever, flee as a criminal from all she loved; and if she could return home, confess all, would that confiding love ever be hers again?  She shrunk in trembling terror from her father’s sternness, her mother’s look of woe, struggling with severity, the coldness, the displeasure she would excite—­on all sides she beheld but misery; but to fly with Lord Alphingham, to bind herself for ever with one, whom every passing hour told her she did not, could not love—­oh, all, all, even death itself, were preferable to that!  The words of her brother sounded incessantly in her ears:  “If you value my sister’s future peace, let her be withdrawn from his society.”  How did she know that those words were wholly without foundation? the countenance of the Viscount as he had alluded to them confirmed them to her now awakened eye.  Was she about to wed herself to crime?  She remembered the perfect justness, the unwavering charity of her father, and in those softened moments she felt assured he would not have condemned him without good cause.  Why, oh, why had she thus committed herself? where was she to turn for succour? where look for aid to guard her from the fate she had woven for herself?  Where, in her childish faults, had her mother taught her to seek for assistance and forgiveness?  Dare she address her Maker, the God whom, in those months of infatuated blindness, she had deserted; Him, whom her deception towards her parents had offended, for she had trampled on His holy laws, she had honoured them not?

The hour of seven chimed; three hours more, and her fate was irrevocably sealed—­the God of her youth profaned; for could she ever address Him again when the wife of Alphingham? from whose lips no word of religion ever came, whose most simple action had lately evinced contempt for its forms and restrictions.  The beloved guardians of her infant years, the tender friends of her youth insulted, lowered by her conduct in the estimation of the world, liable to reproach; their very devotion for so many years to their children condemned, ridiculed.  An inseparable bar placed between her and the hand-in-hand companions of her youth; never again should she kneel with them around their parents, and with them share the fond impressive blessing.  Oakwood and its attendant innocence and joys, had they passed away for ever?  She thought on the anguish that had been her mother’s, when in her childhood she had sinned, and what was she now about to inflict?  She saw her bowed down in the depth of misery; she heard her agonized prayer for mercy on her child.