magnitude of the various
anguish which she was called upon to endure. The sharp alternations of
certainty and doubt which she had undergone seemed slight, seemed
naught, in comparison with the desolate finality of despair, the fang
of hopeless regret, and the dread of the veiled future with which she
had made no covenant of expectation or preparation, that preyed upon
every plodding step as she went. Her anxiety as to the wisdom of her
course was not assuaged by the aghast dismay of her mother's face,
when she reached the little house overlooking the encircling
mountains,--as still, as meditative, as majestically unmoved, as if no
more troublous world existed,--and unfolded the story of her visit to
Colbury. She felt for the first time in her life how Justus Hoxon's
friend merited his confidence. Her mother had no reproaches, no
sarcasms, no outbursts of grief. She addressed herself to the support
and the comforting of her daughter, but with so evident a hopelessness
and an expectation of bitter things to come that the girl burst out
sobbing afresh.

"D' ye think Wat air so wuthless ez all that!"

The discipline of life began for her here. As the price of his
political defeat, Walter had scant relish for the triumph he had
scored in love. He was surly, taciturn, or else loud with reproaches
and criminations, which grew more vehement and contumelious if she
answered, seeking to exculpate or justify herself; and if she were
silent, her submission seemed to exasperate him and to develop a
crafty ingenuity in finding fault. He brooded grimly on his brother's
probable exultation when he should return and hear the news of the
casting vote. To fortify himself for the encounter he spent much time
at the still, and his drunken, reasonless wrath was even more
formidable to the object of his displeasure than his sober, surly
resentment against her as the cause of all his disasters. But Justus
did not come. Walter began to doubt if the news of the untoward result
of the election, in which he had spent all his energies, had reached
him. He also began to desire, contradictorily enough, that his brother
should know it. For although Justus must needs recognize it as a
mortal blow to his dearest foe, it had the capacity of doing much
execution in its recoil. Justus had had the election so greatly at
heart; he had struggled, and planned, and managed with such
preternatural activity and tact and energy from the first, that it
would sm