persons
of her temperament, it may perhaps be said that she was ashamed of this
period of her existence. Appeals to the Ashes yielded less and less, and
Warington seemed to have forsaken her. She awoke at last to a
panic-stricken fear of darker possibilities and more real suffering than
any she had yet known, and under the stress of this fear she collapsed
physically, writing both to Warington and to the Ashes in a tone of
mingled reproach and despair.

The Ashes sent money, and, though Kitty was at the moment not fit to
travel, prepared to come. Warington, who had just closed the eyes of his
sister, went at once. He was now the last of his family, without any
ties that he could not lawfully break. Within two days of his arrival in
Paris, Madame d'Estrees had promised to marry him in three months, to
break off all her Paris associations, and to give her life henceforward
into his somewhat stern hands. The visit to Venice was part of the price
that he had had to pay for her decision. Marguerite pleaded, with a
shudder, that she must have a little amusement before she went to live
in Dumfriesshire; and he had been obliged to acquiesce in her
arrangement with Donna Laura--stipulating only that he should be their
escort and guardian.

What had moved him to such an act? His reasons can only be guessed at.
Warington was a man of religion, a Calvinist by education and
inheritance, and of a silent and dreamy temperament. He had been
intimate with very few women in his life. His sister had been a second
mother to him, and both of them had been the guardians of their younger
brother. When this adored brother fell shot through the lungs in the
hopeless defence of Lady Blackwater's reputation, it would have been
natural enough that Markham should hate the woman who had been the
occasion of such a calamity. The sister, a pious and devoted Christian,
had indeed hated her, properly and duly, thenceforward. Markham, on the
contrary, accepted his brother's last commission without reluctance. In
this matter at least Lady Blackwater had not been directly to blame; his
mind acquitted her; and her soft, distressed beauty touched his heart.
Before he knew where he was she had made an impression upon him that was
to be life-long.

Then gradually he awoke to a full knowledge of her character. He
suffered, but otherwise it made no difference. Finding it was then
impossible to persuade her to marry him, he watched over her as best he
could f