s it; but to claim her
son's rights, and make an earl of him, had become her fixed idea, and
she began laying aside every farthing in her power.

In this she was encouraged, not by the lawyer who had made the
will--and who, considering that poor Faith's witnesses had been
destroyed, and her certificate and her wedding ring taken from her by
the Indians, thought that the marriage could not be substantiated--but
by a clever young clerk, who had managed to find out the state of
things; a man named Perrault, who used to come to the farm, always when
Lea was out, and talk her into a further state of excitement about her
child's expectations, and the injuries she was suffering. It was her
one idea. She says she really believes she should have gone mad if the
saving had not occupied her; and a very dreary life poor Joel must have
had whilst she was scraping together the passage-money. He still
steadily and sternly disapproved the whole, and when at two years' end
she had put together enough to bring her and her boy home, and maintain
them there for a few weeks, he still refused to go with her. The last
thing he said was, "Remember, Hester, what was the price of all the
kingdoms of the world! Thou wilt have it, then! Would that I could
say, my blessing go with thee." And he took his child, and held him
long in his arms, and never spoke one word over him but, "My poor boy!"

CHAPTER II.

TREVORSHAM

I suppose I had better tell what we had been doing all this time. Adela
and I had come out, and had a season or two in London, and my father
had enjoyed our pleasure in it, and paid a good deal of court to our
pretty Adela, because there was no driving Torwood into anything warmer
than easy brotherly companionship.

In fact, Torwood had never cared for anyone but little Emily Deerhurst.
Once he had come to her rescue, when she was only nine or ten years
old, and her schoolboy cousins were teasing her, and at every
Twelfth-day party since she and he had come together as by right.
There was something irresistible in her great soft plaintive brown
eyes, though she was scarcely pretty otherwise, and we used to call her
the White Doe of Rylstone. Torwood was six or seven years older, and
no one supposed that he seriously cared for her, till she was sixteen.
Then, when my father spoke point blank to him about Adela, he was
driven into owning what he wished.

My father thought it utter absurdity. The connection was no