ce was about to answer, he sealed her lips with his kiss.

But Lady Erpingham was not one of those who waver in what they deem a
duty. She passed the night in stern and sleepless commune with herself;
she was aware of all that she hazarded--all that she renounced: she was
even tortured by scruples as to the strange oath that had almost unsexed
her. Still, in spite of all, she felt that nothing would excuse her in
suffering that gifted and happy intellect, now awakened from the sleep
of the Sybarite, to fall back into its lazy and effeminate repose. She
had no right to doom a human soul to rot away in its clay. Perhaps,
too, she hoped, as all polemical enthusiasts do, that Godolphin, once
aroused, would soon become her convert. Be that as it may, she delayed,
on various pretences, their departure from London. She went secretly the
next day to one of the proprietors of the close Boroughs, the existence
of which was about to be annihilated, and a few days afterwards
Godolphin received a letter informing him that he had been duly elected
member for ----. I will not say what were his feelings at these tidings.
Perhaps, such is man's proud and wayward heart, he felt shame to be so
outdone by Constance.

CHAPTER LXV.

NEW VIEWS OF A PRIVILEGED ORDER.--THE DEATH-BED OF AUGUSTUS SAVILLE.

This event might indeed have been an era in the life of Percy Godolphin,
had that life been spared to a more extended limit than it was; and
yet, so long had his ambition been smoothed and polished away by his
peculiarities of thought, and so little was his calm and indifferent
tone of mind suited to the hot contests and nightly warfare of
parliamentary politics, that it is not probable he would ever have won
a continuous and solid distinction in a career which requires either
obtuseness of mind or enthusiasm of purpose to encounter the repeated
mortifications and failures which the most brilliant debutant ordinarily
endures. As it was, however, it produced a grave and solemn train of
thought in Godolphin's breast. He mused much over his past life, and
the musing did not satisfy him. He felt like one of those recorded
in physiological history who have been in a trance for years: and now
slowly awakening, he acknowledged the stir and rush of revived but
confused emotions. Nature, perhaps, had intended Godolphin for a
poet; for, with the exception of the love of glory, the poetical
characteristics were rife within him; and over his whole