rses--she soon persuaded her husband to accompany
her to her old haunts.

"Do not imagine, dearest," said she, "that I have any project of
debasing you and myself, by intruding into my father's presence. Had
we been still prosperous, Everard, I would have gone to him--knelt to
him--prayed to him--wept to him--_so_ earnestly, that his forgiveness
could not have been long withheld from the child he loved so dearly. I
would have described to him all you are to me--all your
indulgences--all your devotion--and _you_, too, my own husband, would
have been forgiven. But as it is, believe me, I have too proud a sense
of what is due to ourselves, to combat the unnatural hostility in
which my sister and her husband appear to take their share. O Everard!
to think of Selina becoming the wife of that coarse and heartless man,
of whom, in former times, she thought even more contemptuously than I;
and who, with his dissolute habits, can only have made my poor
afflicted sister his wife from the most mercenary motives! I dread to
think of what may be her fate hereafter, when, having obtained at my
father's death all the advantages to which he looks forward, he will
show himself in his true colours."

Thus, even with such terrible prospects awaiting herself, the good,
generous Mary trembled only to contemplate those of her regardless
sister; and it was chiefly for the delight of revisiting the spots
where they had played together in childhood--the fondly-remembered
environs of Stanley Manor--that she persuaded her husband to take up
his abode in the deserted mansion at the Park, where, from prudential
motives, Mr Sparks had broken up his establishment, and sold off his
horses.

Attended by a single servant, in addition to the old porter and his
wife who were in charge of the house, Mary trusted that their arrival
at Lexley would be unnoticed in the neighbourhood. Confining herself
strictly within the boundaries of the Park, which neither her father
nor the bride and bridegroom were likely to enter, she conceived that
she might enjoy, on her husband's arm, those solitary rambles of which
every day circumscribed the extent; without affording reason to the
General to suppose, when, discerning every morning from his lofty
terraces the mansion of his falling enemy, that, in place of the man
he loathed, it contained his discarded child.

The dispirited young woman, on the other hand, delighted in
contemplating from the windows of her dress