if you can stay."

The brief epistle had not then arrived, and they were, in truth,
anxious that she should go;--but one cannot tell one's visitor to
depart from one's house without a downright rupture. Not even the
rector himself dared to make such rupture, without express sanction
from the Earl.

Then Lady Anna, feeling that she must ask advice, wrote to her
mother. The Countess had answered her last letter with great
severity,--that letter in which the daughter had declared that people
ought not to be asked to marry for money. The Countess, whose whole
life had made her stern and unbending, said very hard things to
her child; had told her that she was ungrateful and disobedient,
unmindful of her family, neglectful of her duty, and willing to
sacrifice the prosperity and happiness of all belonging to her, for
some girlish feeling of mere romance. The Countess was sure that her
daughter would never forgive herself in after years, if she now
allowed to pass by this golden opportunity of remedying all the evil
that her father had done. "You are simply asked to do that which
every well-bred girl in England would be delighted to do," wrote the
Countess.

"Ah! she does not know," said Lady Anna.

But there had come upon her now a fear heavier and more awful than
that which she entertained for her mother. Earl Lovel knew her
secret, and Earl Lovel was to tell it to the Solicitor-General. She
hardly doubted that it might as well be told to all the judges on the
bench at once. Would it not be better that she should be married to
Daniel Thwaite out of hand, and so be freed from the burden of any
secret? The young lord had been thoroughly ashamed of her when she
told it. Those aunts at Yoxham would hardly speak to her if they knew
it. That lady before whom she had been made to walk out to dinner,
would disdain to sit in the same room with her if she knew it. It
must be known,--must be known to them all. But she need not remain
there, beneath their eyes, while they learned it. Her mother must
know it, and it would be better that she should tell her mother. She
would tell her mother,--and request that she might have permission to
return at once to the lodgings in Wyndham Street. So she wrote the
following letter,--in which, as the reader will perceive, she could
not even yet bring herself to tell her secret:--

Yoxham Rectory, Monday.

MY DEAR MAMMA,

I want you to let me come home, because I think I have