rally half out of
her mind, Arabella rushed into Darrell's study. He, unsuspecting man,
calmly bending over his dull books, was startled by her apparition. Few
minutes sufficed to tell him all that it concerned him to learn. Few
brief questions, few passionate answers, brought him to the very worst.

Who, and what, was this Mr. Hammond? Heaven of heavens! the son of
William Losely--of a transported felon!

Arabella exulted in a reply which gave her a moment's triumph over
the rival who had filched from her such a prize. Roused from his first
misery and sense of abasement in this discovery, Darrell's wrath was
naturally poured, not on the fugitive child, but on the frontless woman,
who, buoyed up by her own rage and sense of wrong, faced him, and did
not cower. She, the faithless governess, had presented to her pupil this
convict's son in another name; she owned it--she had trepanned into the
snares of so vile a fortune-hunter an ignorant child: she might feign
amaze--act remorse--she must have been the man's accomplice. Stung,
amidst all the bewilderment of her anguish, by this charge, which, at
least, she did not deserve, Arabella tore from her bosom Jasper's recent
letters to herself--letters all devotion and passion--placed them
before Darrell, and bade him read. Nothing thought she then of name and
fame--nothing but of her wrongs and of her woes. Compared to herself,
Matilda seemed the perfidious criminal--she the injured victim. Darrell
but glanced over the letters; they were signed "your loving husband."

"What is this?" he exclaimed; "are you married to the man?"

"Yes," cried Arabella, "in the eyes of Heaven!"

To Darrell's penetration there was no mistaking the significance of
those words and that look; and his wrath redoubled. Anger in him, when
once roused, was terrible; he had small need of words to vent it.
His eye withered, his gesture appalled. Conscious but of one burning
firebrand in brain and heart--of a sense that youth, joy, and hope were
for ever gone, that the world could never be the same again--Arabella
left the house, her character lost, her talents useless, her very
means of existence stopped. Who henceforth would take her to teach? Who
henceforth place their children under her charge?

She shrank into a gloomy lodging--she--shut herself up alone with her
despair. Strange though it may seem, her anger against Jasper was slight
as compared with the in tensity of her hate to Matilda. And str