d the old man in his
weakest point, when she resented his question if she had read Mabel's
journal, with so much pride. This haughty denial was a reproach to the
impulse that had seized him to read the book from beginning to end. His
conscience had nothing to urge in the matter, but the meanness of the
thing he intended, struck him forcibly, and after a moment's hesitation,
he closed the journal and laid it in a drawer of his desk. Thus, by
affectation and over-acting, the girl defeated her object, much to her
own mortification. The passage on which General Harrington had opened at
random, was in itself harmless, a warm and somewhat glowing description
of a passage up the Guadalquivir in the spring months, had nothing in it
to provoke farther research, and the General seldom read much from mere
curiosity. Certainly, the book might contain many secret thoughts and
hidden feelings of which Mabel's husband had never dreamed, but it was
many years since the old gentleman had taken sufficient interest in the
feelings of his wife to care about their origin or changes, and so,
Mabel's precious book, in which so many secret thoughts were registered,
and memories stored, lay neglected in her husband's desk.

Fortunately, she was unconscious of her loss. Sometimes for months
together, she shrank from opening the escritoir in which the volume was
kept. At this period, she was under the reaction of a great excitement,
and turned with a nervous shudder from anything calculated to remind her
of all the pain which lay in the past.

Another reason, perhaps, why General Harrington was less curious about
his wife's journal than seemed natural to his tempters, lay in his own
preoccupation at the time. One of his youthful vices had grown strong,
and rooted itself amid the selfishness of his heart; all other sins had
so cooled down and hardened in his nature, that with most men they might
have passed for virtues, the evil was so buried in elegant
conventionalisms; but one active vice he still possessed, always
gleaming up from the white ashes of his burnt out sins, with a spark of
vivid fire.

General Harrington was a gambler. Understand me----it is not probable
that he had ever entered a gambling hall openly or frankly since his
youth, or ever sat down with swindlers or professed blacklegs around the
faro table. The General was altogether too fastidious in his vices for
that. No, he rather plumed himself secretly upon the aristocratic
f