he community, and my audience shall consist of society--that society
which is so much to aunt and the likes of her. Society shall be my
audience, and then, after my course of lectures is over, I will join
the Gypsies. But pray pardon me, mother. I had no idea I should thus
lose my temper. I should not have lost it so entirely had I not
witnessed how you are suffering from the tyranny of this blatant
bugbear called "Society."'

'My suffering, Henry, has brought me nearer to your line of thought
than you may suppose. It has taught me that when the affections are
deeply touched everything which before had seemed so momentous stands
out in a new light, that light in which the insignificance of the
important stands revealed. In that terrible conflict between you and
me on the night following the landslip, you spoke of my "cruel
pride." Oh, Henry, if you only knew how that cruel pride had been
wiped out of existence by remorse, I believe that even you would
forgive me. I believe that even she would if she were here.'

'I told you that I had entirely forgiven you, mother, and that I was
sure Winnie would forgive you if she were alive.'

'You did, Henry, but it did not satisfy me; I felt that you did not
know all.'

'I fear you have been very unhappy,' I said.

'I have been constantly thinking of Winifred a beggar in the streets
as described by Wilderspin. Oh, Henry, I used to think of her in the
charge of that woman. And Miss Dalrymple, who educated her, tells me
that in culture she was far above the girls of her own class; and
this makes the degradation into which she was forced through me the
more dreadful for me to think of. I used to think of her dying in the
squalid den, and then the Italian sunshine has seemed darker than a
London fog. Even the comfort that your kind words gave me was
incomplete, for you did not know the worst features of my cruelty.'

'But have you had no respite, mother? Surely the intensity of this
pain did not last, or it would have killed you.'

'The crisis did pass, for, as you say, had it lasted in its most
intense form, it would have killed me or sent me mad. After a while,
though remorse was always with me, I seemed to become in some degree
numbed against its sting. I could bear at last to live, but that was
all. Yet there was always one hour out of the twenty-four when I was
overmastered by pathetic memories, such as nearly killed me with
pity--one hour when, in a sudden and irresistibl