may
do so the more earnestly for not having cast off the burthen on me. You
are no child now, to whom your poor Honey's pardon almost seems an
absolution. I sometimes think we went on with that too long.'

'No fear of my ever being a boy again,' said Owen, heavily, as he put the
draft into his purse, and then bent his tall person to kiss her with the
caressing fondness of his childhood, almost compensating for what his
sister caused her to undergo.

Then, at the door, he turned to say, 'Remember, you would not hear.' He
was gone, having left a thorn with Honor, in the doubt whether she ought
not to have accepted his confidence; but her abstinence had been such a
mortification both of curiosity and of hostility to the Charterises that
she could not but commend herself for it. She had strong faith in the
efficacy of trust upon an honourable mind, and though it was evident that
Owen had, in his own eyes, greatly transgressed, she reserved the hope
that his error was magnified by his own consciousness, and admired the
generosity that refused to betray another. She believed his present
suffering to be the beginning of that growth in true religion which is
often founded on some shock leading to self-distrust.

Alas! how many falls have been counted by mothers as the preludes to
rising again, like the clearing showers of a stormy day.

CHAPTER VIII

Fearless she had tracked his feet
To this rocky, wild retreat,
And when morning met his view,
Her mild glances met it too.
Ah! your saints have cruel hearts,
Sternly from his bed he starts,
And with rude, repulsive shock,
Hurls her from the beetling rock.--T. MOORE

The deed was done. Conventionalities were defied, vaunts fulfilled, and
Lucilla sat on a camp-stool on the deck of a steamer, watching the Welsh
mountains rise, grow dim, and vanish gradually.

Horatia, in common with all the rest of the womankind, was prostrate on
the cabin floor, treating Cilly's smiles and roses as aggravations of her
misery. Had there been a sharer in her exultation, the gay pitching and
dancing of the steamer would have been charming to Lucy, but when she
retreated from the scene of wretchedness below, she felt herself lonely,
and was conscious of some surprise among the surviving gentlemen at her
reappearance.

She took out a book as a protection, and read more continuously than she
had done since _Vanity Fair_ had come to the Holt, and she