he knew everything and would have told her all.  And then she blamed him for his harsh and unfeeling demeanour, and his total want of sympathy with her cruel and perplexing situation.  She had intended, she had struggled to be so kind to him; she thought she had such a plain tale to tell that he would have listened to it in considerate silence, and bowed to her necessary and inevitable decision without a murmur.  Amid all these harassing emotions her mind tossed about like a ship without a rudder, until, in her despair, she almost resolved to confess everything to her mother, and to request her to soothe and enlighten her agitated and confounded mind.  But what hope was there of solace or information from such a quarter?  Lady Annabel’s was not a mind to be diverted from her purpose.  Whatever might have been the conduct of her husband, it was evident that Lady Annabel had traced out a course from which she had resolved not to depart.  She remembered the earnest and repeated advice of Dr. Masham, that virtuous and intelligent man who never advised anything but for their benefit.  How solemnly had he enjoined upon her never to speak to her mother upon the subject, unless she wished to produce misery and distress!  And what could her mother tell her?  Her father lived, he had abandoned her, he was looked upon as a criminal, and shunned by the society whose laws and prejudices he had alike outraged.  Why should she revive, amid the comparative happiness and serenity in which her mother now lived, the bitter recollection of the almost intolerable misfortune of her existence?  No!  Venetia was resolved to be a solitary victim.  In spite of her passionate and romantic devotion to her father she loved her mother with perfect affection, the mother who had dedicated her life to her child, and at least hoped she had spared her any share in their common unhappiness.  And this father, whoso image haunted her dreams, whose unknown voice seemed sometimes to float to her quick ear upon the wind, could he be that abandoned being that Cadurcis had described, and that all around her, and all the circumstances of her life, would seem to indicate?  Alas! it might be truth; alas! it seemed like truth:  and for one so lost, so utterly irredeemable, was she to murmur against that pure and benevolent parent who had cherished her with such devotion, and snatched her perhaps from disgrace, dishonour, and despair!

And Cadurcis, would he return?  With all his violence, the kind Cadurcis!  Never did she need a brother more than now; and now he was absent, and she had parted with him in anger, deep, almost deadly:  she, too, who had never before uttered a harsh word to a human being, who had been involved in only one quarrel in her life, and that almost unconsciously, and which had nearly broken her heart.  She wept, bitterly she wept, this poor Venetia!