'you
are at length at Cherbury.'

Once more at Cherbury! It was, indeed, an event that recalled a
thousand associations. In the wild anguish of her first grief, when
the dreadful intelligence was broken to her, if anyone had whispered
to Venetia that she would yet find herself once more at Cherbury, she
would have esteemed the intimation as mockery. But time and hope will
struggle with the most poignant affliction, and their influence is
irresistible and inevitable. From her darkened chamber in their
Mediterranean villa, Venetia had again come forth, and crossed
mountains, and traversed immense plains, and journeyed through many
countries. She could not die, as she had supposed at first that she
must, and therefore she had exerted herself to quit, and to quit
speedily, a scene so terrible as their late abode. She was the very
first to propose their return to England, and to that spot where she
had passed her early life, and where she now wished to fulfil, in
quiet and seclusion, the allotment of her remaining years; to
meditate over the marvellous past, and cherish its sweet and bitter
recollections. The native firmness of Lady Annabel, her long exercised
control over her emotions, the sadness and subdued tone which the
early incidents of her career had cast over her character, her
profound sympathy with her daughter, and that religious consolation
which never deserted her, had alike impelled and enabled her to bear
up against the catastrophe with more fortitude than her child. The
arrow, indeed, had struck Venetia with a double barb. She was the
victim; and all the cares of Lady Annabel had been directed to soothe
and support this stricken lamb. Yet perhaps these unhappy women must
have sunk under their unparalleled calamities, had it not been for the
devotion of their companion. In the despair of his first emotions,
George Cadurcis was nearly plunging himself headlong into the wave
that had already proved so fatal to his house. But when he thought of
Lady Annabel and Venetia in a foreign land, without a single friend in
their desolation, and pictured them to himself with the dreadful news
abruptly communicated by some unfeeling stranger; and called upon,
in the midst of their overwhelming agony, to attend to all the
heart-rending arrangements which the discovery of the bodies of the
beings to whom they were devoted, and in whom all their feelings were
centred, must necessarily entail upon them, he recoiled from what