-ruin for all the actors and
victims of the wretched conspiracy. Laura marked my disturbance when we
reached home. She even divined the cause of it, and charged me with it
at night, when we sate alone by our dressing-room fire, and had taken
leave of our kind entertainers. Then, under her cross-examination, I own
that I told what I had seen--Lord Highgate, under a feigned name staying
at Newcome. It might be nothing. "Nothing! Gracious heavens! Could
not this crime and misery be stopped?" "It might be too late," Laura's
husband said sadly, bending down his head into the fire.

She was silent too for a while. I could see she was engaged where pious
women ever will betake themselves in moments of doubt, of grief, of
pain, of separation, of joy even, or whatsoever other trial. They have
but to will, and as it were an invisible temple rises round them; their
hearts can kneel down there; and they have an audience of the great,
the merciful untiring Counsellor and Consoler. She would not have been
frightened at Death near at hand. I have known her to tend the poor
round about us, or to bear pain--not her own merely, but even her
children's and mine, with a surprising outward constancy and calm. But
the idea of this crime being enacted close at hand, and no help for
it--quite overcame her. I believe she lay awake all that night; and rose
quite haggard and pale after the bitter thoughts which had deprived her
of rest.

She embraced her own child with extraordinary tenderness that morning,
and even wept over it, calling it by a thousand fond names of maternal
endearment "Would I leave you, my darling--could I ever, ever, ever quit
you, my blessing, and treasure!" The unconscious little thing, hugged
to his mother's bosom, and scared at her tones and tragic face, clung
frightened and weeping round Laura's neck. Would you ask what the
husband's feelings were as he looked at that sweet love, that sublime
tenderness, that pure Saint blessing the life of him unworthy? Of all
the gifts of Heaven to us below, that felicity is the sum and the chief.
I tremble as I hold it lest I should lose it, and be left alone in the
blank world without it: again, I feel humiliated to think that I possess
it; as hastening home to a warm fireside and a plentiful table, I
feel ashamed sometimes before the poor outcast beggar shivering in the
street.

Breakfast was scarcely over when Laura asked for a pony carriage, and
said she was bent on a private