laws of
England? Is the widow left to starve?--is the orphan left houseless,
except some formality or other be gone through? To whom descends the
heritage of the father, while the son is still living?" From these
thoughts, which no ingenuity of hers could pierce, she turned to others
not less depressing. What had become of all those who once called
themselves her husband's friends? She, it is true, had herself lived
estranged and retired from the world; but Walter was everywhere,--all
knew him, all professed to love him. Bitter as ingratitude will ever
seem, all its poignancy is nothing compared to the smart it inflicts
when practised towards those who have gone from us forever; we feel then
as though treachery had been added to the wrong. "Oh!" cried she, in her
anguish, "how have they repaid him whose heart and hand were ever open
to them!" A flood of recollections, long dammed up by the habits of her
daily life, and the little cares by which she was environed, now swept
through her mind, and from her infancy and her childhood, in all its
luxurious splendor, to her present destitution, each passage of her
existence seemed revealed before her. The solitude of the lonely cottage
suggesting such utter desolation, and the wild and storm-lashed scene
without adding its influence to her depression, she sat for some time
still and unmoved, like one entranced; and then, springing to her feet,
she rushed out into the beating rain, glad to exchange the conflict of
the storm for that more terrible war that waged within her.

Like one flying from some terrific enemy, she ran with all her speed
towards the shore. The sea was now breaking over the rocks with
tremendous force, and sending vast clouds of spray high into the air,
while whole sheets of foam were wildly tossed about by the wind. Through
these she struggled on; now stumbling or falling, as her tender feet
yielded to the sharp rocks, till she reached a little promontory over
the sea, on which the waves struck with all their force; and there, with
streaming hair and dripping garments, she sat braving the hurricane,
and, in a wild paroxysm of imagined heroism, daring fortune to her
worst.

Physical ills are as nothing to those that make the heart their
dwelling-place; and to her there seemed an unspeakable relief in the
thundering crash of the storm, as compared with the desolate silence of
her lonely house.

[Illustration: Self-same spot]

The whole of that day saw h