had been the gainer by this ignominious barter; the foibles and
weaknesses of the lover assumed a despicable as well as hateful dye. And
in feeling herself degraded, she loathed him. The day after she had made
the discovery we have referred to, Mrs. Welford left the house of her
protector, none knew whither. For two years from that date, all trace
of her history was lost. At the end of that time what was Welford? A man
rapidly rising in the world, distinguished at the Bar, where his first
brief had lifted him into notice, commencing a flattering career in
the senate, holding lucrative and honourable offices, esteemed for the
austere rectitude of his moral character, gathering the golden opinions
of all men, as he strode onward to public reputation. He had re-assumed
his hereditary name; his early history was unknown; and no one in the
obscure and distant town of ------ had ever guessed that the humble
Welford was the William Brandon whose praise was echoed in so many
journals, and whose rising genius was acknowledged by all. That
asperity, roughness, and gloom which had noted him at ------, and which,
being natural to him, he deigned not to disguise in a station ungenial
to his talents and below his hopes, were now glitteringly varnished over
by an hypocrisy well calculated to aid his ambition. So learnedly could
this singular man fit himself to others that few among the great met him
as a companion, nor left him without the temper to become his friend.
Through his noble rival--that is (to make our reader's "surety doubly
sure"), through Lord Mauleverer--he had acquired his first lucrative
office, a certain patronage from government, and his seat in parliament.
If he had persevered at the Bar rather than given himself entirely to
State intrigues, it was only because his talents were eminently more
calculated to advance him in the former path to honour than in the
latter. So devoted was he become to public life that he had only
permitted himself to cherish one private source of enjoyment,--his son.
As no one, not even his brother, knew he had been married (during the
two years of his disguised name, he had been supposed abroad), the
appearance of this son made the only piece of scandal whispered against
the rigid morality of his fair fame; but he himself, waiting his own
time for avowing a legitimate heir, gave out that it was the orphan
child of a dear friend whom he had known abroad; and the puritan
demureness not only o