discovered no trace of Letty,
left the door unlocked, and went to bed, hoping she might yet find her
way into the house before Mrs. Wardour was down.

When that lady awoke at the usual hour, and heard no sound of stir, she
put on her dressing-gown, and went, in the anger of a housekeeper, to
Letty's room: there, to her amazement and horror, she saw the bed had
lain all the night expectant. She hurried thence to the room occupied
by the girl who was the cause of the mischief. Roused suddenly by the
voice of her mistress, she got up half awake, and sleepy-headed; and,
assailed by a torrent of questions, answered so, in her confusion, as
to give the initiative to others: before she was well awake, she had
told all she had seen from the window, but nothing of what she had
herself done. Mrs. Wardour hurried to the kitchen, found the door on
the latch, believed everything and much more, went straight to her
son's room, and, in a calm rage, woke him up, and poured into his
unwilling ears a torrent of mingled fact and fiction, wherein floated
side by side with Letty's name every bad adjective she could bring the
lips of propriety to utter. Before he quite came to himself the news
had well-nigh driven him mad. There stood his mother, dashing her cold
hailstorm of contemptuous wrath on the girl he loved, whom he had gone
to bed believing the sweetest creature in creation, and loving himself
more than she dared show! He had been dreaming of her with the utmost
tenderness, when his mother woke him with the news that she had gone in
the night with Tom Helmer, the poorest creature in the neighborhood.

"For God's sake, mother," he cried, "go away, and let me get up!"

"What can you do, Godfrey? What is there to be done? Let the jade go to
her ruin!" cried Mrs. Wardour, alarmed in the midst of her wrath. "You
_can_ do nothing now. As she has made her bed, so she must lie."

Her words were torture to him. He sprang from his bed, and proceeded to
pull on his clothes. Terrified at the wildness of his looks, his mother
fled from the room, but only to watch at the door.

Scarcely could Godfrey dress himself for agitation; brain and heart
seemed to mingle in chaotic confusion. Anger strove with unbelief, and
indignation at his mother with the sense of bitter wrong from Letty. It
was all incredible and shameful, yet not the less utterly miserable.
The girl whose Idea lay in the innermost chamber of his heart like the
sleeping beauty in