nows I ever prayed it might be!'

A short silence intervened, which Nicholas made no effort to break.

'If trial and calamity had fallen as lightly on his head, as in the
deepest truth of my own heart I ever hoped (for her sake) it would, his
life would have been one of peace and happiness,' said the old gentleman
calmly. 'It will be enough to say that this was not the case; that
she was not happy; that they fell into complicated distresses and
difficulties; that she came, twelve months before her death, to appeal
to my old friendship; sadly changed, sadly altered, broken-spirited from
suffering and ill-usage, and almost broken-hearted. He readily availed
himself of the money which, to give her but one hour's peace of mind,
I would have poured out as freely as water--nay, he often sent her back
for more--and yet even while he squandered it, he made the very success
of these, her applications to me, the groundwork of cruel taunts and
jeers, protesting that he knew she thought with bitter remorse of the
choice she had made, that she had married him from motives of interest
and vanity (he was a gay young man with great friends about him when
she chose him for her husband), and venting in short upon her, by every
unjust and unkind means, the bitterness of that ruin and disappointment
which had been brought about by his profligacy alone. In those times
this young lady was a mere child. I never saw her again until that
morning when you saw her also, but my nephew, Frank--'

Nicholas started, and indistinctly apologising for the interruption,
begged his patron to proceed.

'--My nephew, Frank, I say,' resumed Mr Cheeryble, 'encountered her by
accident, and lost sight of her almost in a minute afterwards, within
two days after he returned to England. Her father lay in some secret
place to avoid his creditors, reduced, between sickness and poverty, to
the verge of death, and she, a child,--we might almost think, if we did
not know the wisdom of all Heaven's decrees--who should have blessed a
better man, was steadily braving privation, degradation, and everything
most terrible to such a young and delicate creature's heart, for the
purpose of supporting him. She was attended, sir,' said brother Charles,
'in these reverses, by one faithful creature, who had been, in old
times, a poor kitchen wench in the family, who was then their solitary
servant, but who might have been, for the truth and fidelity of her
heart--who might have