, and still
her own intelligence, which in early youth had been characterised by
singular vivacity and brightness, and which Time had enriched with every
womanly accomplishment, seemed chilled and objectless. It is not enough
that a mind should be cultured--it should have movement as well as
culture. Caroline Montfort's lay quiescent like a beautiful form
spellbound to repose, but not to sleep. Looking on her once, as he stood
amongst a crowd whom her beauty dazzled, a poet said abruptly: "Were my
guess not a sacrilege to one so spotless and so haughty, I should say
that I had hit on the solution of an enigma that long perplexed me;
and in the core of that queen of the lilies, could we strip the leaves
folded round it, we should find Remorse."

Lady Montfort started; the shadow of another form than her own fell
upon the sward. George Morley stood behind her, his finger on his lips.
"Hush," he said in a whisper, "see, Sophy is looking for me up the river.
I knew she would be--I stole this way on purpose--for I would speak to
you before I face her questions."

"What is the matter? you alarm me," said Lady Montfort, on gaining a
part of the grounds more remote from the river, to which George had
silently led the way.

"Nay, my dear cousin, there is less cause for alarm than for anxious
deliberation, and that upon more matters than those which directly
relate to our poor fugitive. You know that I long shrunk from enlisting
the police in aid of our search. I was too sensible of the pain and
offence which such an application would occasion Waife--(let us continue
so to call him)--and the discovery of it might even induce him to put
himself beyond our reach, and quit England. But his prolonged silence,
and my fears lest some illness or mishap might have befallen him,
together with my serious apprehensions of the effect which unrelieved
anxiety might produce on Sophy's health, made me resolve to waive former
scruples. Since I last saw you I have applied to one of the higher
police-officers accustomed to confidential investigations of a similar
nature. The next day he came to tell me that he had learned that a
friend of his, who had been formerly a distinguished agent in the
detective police, had been engaged for months in tracking a person whom
he conjectured to be the same as the one whom I had commissioned him
to discover, and with somewhat less caution and delicacy than I had
enjoined. The fugitive's real name had been gi