English peer. Your parents are yet living; but their
union, which was in many points unequal, was, alas! rendered the
more unequal by a gulf-like disproportion in the passion that
provoked it;--a gulf, too, that was undiscovered, till, too late,
your mother saw it. Thence, their lives, their loves, so call it,
their mutual progress (save on the course of fondness towards
yourself, their child, whereon they journey equal side by side)
has for years kept, and yet keeps, a still disparting pace; and,
oh, Amanda, excuse these tears, for well I know your mother, and
pity her, having many a time listened to her fruitless complaints;
but until your father, who is the laggard one of this most
misappointed pair, shall, either underneath the whip of a castigating
conscience, or prompted by the spur of your poor mother's sharp
appeals, come up abreast, and fill a certain chasm of omission by
an indemnifying deed, which has been by him most selfishly left
undone, but whose performance is essential to the full fruition by
you of your fortune, you must remain, as you have hitherto done,
my foster-child, and your grim guardian's ward; a waif we hold
waiting for its claimants; and until they arrive, let me beseech
you, as though I were the mother I have spoken of, to think no
further of young Claude Montigny."

CHAPTER IX.

"Any bar, any cross, any impediment will be medicinable to me:
I am sick in displeasure to him; and whatsoever comes athwart
his affection, ranges evenly with mine. How canst thou cross
this marriage?"

_Much ado about nothing._

A few days after the conversation detailed in the preceding chapter,
there was ushered into the office of the advocate at Montreal a
gentleman, who announced himself as Montigny, Seigneur of Mainville.
He was tall, and of a distinguished aspect, and had scarcely accepted
of the advocate's invitation to be seated, when, like a man impatient
to be done with a disagreeable business, he began:

"I have a son, sir, and you, as I believe, a ward, an orphan girl;"
pronouncing with a mixture of pity and contempt the last two words.

The advocate observed this depreciatory intonation, and throwing
himself backwards in his large easy chair, repeated: "An orphan
girl," at the same time putting a half angry, half comical expression
into his countenance, and perpetrating a pun in what followed:
"Yes, many of your Canadian noblesse would bless themselves to have
been her fat