‘Hush! hush!’ said Lady Annabel, ’I do not blame you, and therefore you need not defend yourself.  Go, Pauncefort, I must be alone.’  Pauncefort withdrew, and Lady Annabel resumed her seat by her daughter’s side.

On the fourth day of her attack the medical attendants observed a favourable change in their patient, and were not, of course, slow in communicating this joyful intelligence to her mother.  The crisis had occurred and was past:  Venetia had at length sunk into slumber.  How different was her countenance from the still yet settled features they had before watched with such anxiety!  She breathed lightly, the tension of the eyelids had disappeared, her mouth was slightly open.  The physician and his colleague declared that immediate danger was past, and they counselled Lady Annabel to take repose.  On condition that one of them should remain by the side of her daughter, the devoted yet miserable mother quitted, for the first time her child’s apartment.  Pauncefort followed her to her room.

‘Oh! my lady,’ said Pauncefort, ’I am so glad your la’ship is going to lie down a bit.’

‘I am not going to lie down, Pauncefort.  Give me the key.’

And Lady Annabel proceeded alone to the forbidden chamber, that chamber which, after what has occurred, we may now enter with her, and where, with so much labour, she had created a room exactly imitative of their bridal apartment at her husband’s castle.  With a slow but resolved step she entered the apartment, and proceeding immediately to the table, took up the book; it opened at the stanzas to Venetia.  The pages had recently been bedewed with tears.  Lady Annabel then looked at the bridal bed, and marked the missing rose in the garland:  it was as she expected.  She seated herself then in the chair opposite the portrait, on which she gazed with a glance rather stern than fond.

‘Marmion,’ she exclaimed, ’for fifteen years, a solitary votary, I have mourned over, in this temple of baffled affections, the inevitable past.  The daughter of our love has found her way, perhaps by an irresistible destiny, to a spot sacred to my long-concealed sorrows.  At length she knows her father.  May she never know more!  May she never learn that the being, whose pictured form has commanded her adoration, is unworthy of those glorious gifts that a gracious Creator has bestowed upon him!  Marmion, you seem to smile upon me; you seem to exult in your triumph over the heart of your child.  But there is a power in a mother’s love that yet shall baffle you.  Hitherto I have come here to deplore the past; hitherto I have come here to dwell upon the form that, in spite of all that has happened, I still was, perhaps, weak enough, to love.  Those feelings are past for ever.  Yes! you would rob me of my child, you would tear from my heart the only consolation you have left me.  But Venetia shall still be mine; and I, I am no longer yours.  Our love, our still lingering love, has