tween General
Harrington and myself."

Ralph wrung the hand extended to him, and the two went out, each taking
his own way.

CHAPTER LXXV.

THE DESERTED CHAMBER.

Mabel had been very ill; the sense of humiliation, the outrage on every
feeling of delicacy that had beset her after the fragments of that
vellum book were placed in her hand, fell upon her strength with
terrible effect. To herself, she seemed disgraced forever; the holiest
portion of her life was torn away, to be trodden down by the feet of the
multitude. No sin, however heinous, could have fallen upon her with more
crushing effect. The very maturity of age, which should have so far
removed her from the romance of love, embittered her grief by a sense of
self-ridicule. At times, she felt like reviling and scoffing at
affections that up to this time had been hoarded away from her own
thoughts. For a train of wrong feelings, unaccompanied by a single false
act, save that of her marriage, she was suffering the most terrible
humiliation before God and her own conscience.

Is it strange that her nerves, so long excited and so delicate in
themselves, gave way at last, prostrating her to the earth, strengthless
as a child? She did not leave her room, she scarcely looked up when the
servants entered it, and was so broken and bowed down by the weight of
her shame, that even the absence of her son was disregarded. No criminal
ever shrank from the face of man more sensitively than this high-souled
woman.

It annoyed Mabel to see any one enter her apartments. When the mulatto
chambermaid came there, in the ordinary course of her duties, she would
shrink back in her chair and shade her eyes, as if some hideous spectre
had crossed her path; but, if Agnes Barker entered, this nervous shock
became unendurable, and it was with the greatest effort that she could
refrain from rushing madly into the next room, and holding the door
against her intrusions.

One night--it was that on which James Harrington went out in search of
an explanation from the General--Mabel was more terribly oppressed than
ever; all the bitter recollections of a most tedious life crowded upon
her at once. She longed to flee away into some new place, where human
intrusion would be impossible--and yet Agnes Barker would enter the
room; again and again she saw the poor woman wince and shiver at her
approach, but with malicious servility insisted on arranging her
cushions, and performing all