dest love. Write to me at once, if only
to condole with me about the chapel.

Most affectionately yours,

JANET FENWICK.

My sister and Mr. Quickenham are coming here for
Easter week, and I have still some hopes of getting my
brother-in-law to put us up to some way of fighting the
Marquis and his myrmidons. I have always heard it said
that there was no case in which Mr. Quickenham couldn't
make a fight.

Mary Lowther understood well the whole purport of this letter,--all
that was meant as well as all that was written. She had told herself
again and again that there had been that between her and the lover
she had lost,--tender embraces, warm kisses, a bird-like pressure
of the plumage,--which alone should make her deem it unfit that she
should be to another man as she had been to him, even should her
heart allow it. It was against this doctrine that her friend had
preached, with more or less of explicitness in her sermon. And how
was the truth? If she could take a lesson on that subject from any
human being in the world, she would take it from her friend Janet
Fenwick. But she rebelled against the preaching, and declared to
herself that her friend had never been tried, and therefore did not
understand the case. Must she not be guided by her own feelings, and
did she not feel that she could never lay her head on the shoulder of
another lover without blushing at her memories of the past?

And yet how hard was it all! It was not the joys of young love
that she regretted in her present mood, not the loss of those soft
delights of which she had suddenly found herself to be so capable;
but that all the world should be dark and dreary before her! And he
could hunt, could dance, could work,--no doubt could love again! How
happy would it be for her if her reason would allow her to be a Roman
Catholic, and a nun!

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

A LOVER'S MADNESS.

The letter from Mrs. Fenwick, which the reader has just seen, was the
immediate effect of a special visit which Mr. Gilmore had made to
her. On the 10th of March he had come to her with a settled purpose,
pointing out to her that he had now waited a certain number of months
since he had heard of the rupture between Mary and her cousin, naming
the exact period which Mrs. Fenwick had bade him wait before he
should move again in the matter, and asking her whether he might not
now venture to take some step. Mrs. Fenwick had felt it to be u