her
gaieties for the forest missions; she made her mother write cordially,
and send out a pretty gift, and treated as a personal affront all reports
of the Charteris disapprobation, and of the self-will of the young
people. They were married, and the next news that Honora heard was, that
the old general had had a fit from passion; thirdly, came tidings that
the eldest son, a prosperous M.P., had not only effected a
reconciliation, but had obtained a capital living for Mr. Sandbrook, not
far from the family seat.

Mrs. Charlecote declared that her daughter should not stay in town to
meet the young couple, and Honora's resistance was not so much dignity,
as a feverish spirit of opposition, which succumbed to her sense of duty,
but not without such wear and tear of strained cheerfulness and
suppressed misery, that when at length her mother had brought her away,
the fatigue of the journey completed the work, and she was prostrated for
weeks by low fever. The blow had fallen. He had put his hand to the
plough and looked back. Faithlessness towards herself had been passed
over unrecognized, faithlessness towards his self-consecration was quite
otherwise. That which had absorbed her affections and adoration had
proved an unstable, excitable being! Alas! would that long ago she had
opened her eyes to the fact that it was her own lofty spirit, not his
steadfastness, which had first kept it out of the question that the
mission should be set aside for human love. The crash of her idolatry
was the greater because it had been so highly pitched, so closely
intermingled with the true worship. She was long ill, the past series of
disappointments telling when her strength was reduced; and for many a
week she would lie still and dreamy, but fretted and wearied, so as to
control herself with difficulty when in the slightest degree disturbed,
or called upon to move or think. When her strength returned under her
mother's tender nursing the sense of duty revived. She thought her youth
utterly gone with the thinning of her hair and the wasting of her cheeks,
but her mother must be the object of her care and solicitude, and she
would exert herself for her sake, to save her grief, and hide the wound
left by the rending away of the jewel of her heart. So she set herself
to seem to like whatever her mother proposed, and she acted her interest
so well that insensibly it became real. After all, she was but
four-and-twenty, and the fever