Sophy's exquisite, simple virtues, and inborn grace;
and, believing her claim to Darrell's lineage, Lady Montfort thought
but of the joy and blessing one so good and so loving might bring to
his joyless hearth. She was not thinking of morbid pride and mouldering
ancestors, but of soothing charities and loving ties. And Lady Montfort,
I now suspect, in her scheme for our happiness--for Darrell's--had an
interest which involved her own!"

"Her own!"

"Yes; I see it all now."

"See what? you puzzle me."

"I told you that Darrell, in his letter to me, wrote with great
bitterness of Lady Montfort."

"Very natural that he should. Who would not resent such interference?"

"Listen. I told you that, at his own command, I sent to her that letter;
that she, on receiving it, went herself to Fawley, to plead our cause. I
was sanguine of the result."

"Why?"

"Because he who is in love has a wondrous intuition into all the
mysteries of love in others; and when I read Darrell's letter I felt
sure that he had once loved--loved still, perhaps--the woman he so
vehemently reproached."

"Ha!" said the Man of the World, intimate with Guy Darrell from his
school-days--"Ha! is it possible! And they say that I know everything!
You were sanguine,--I understand. Yes, if your belief were true--if
there were some old attachment that could be revived--some old
misunderstanding explained away--stop; let me think. True, true--it was
just after her marriage that he fled from the world. Ah, my dear Lionel;
light, light! light dawns on me! Not without reason were you sanguine.
Your hand, my dear boy; I see hope for you at last. For if the sole
reason that prevented Darrell contracting a second marriage was the
unconquered memory of a woman like Lady Montfort (where, indeed, her
equal in beauty, in disposition so akin to his own ideal of womanly
excellence?)--and if she too has some correspondent sentiment for him,
why then, indeed, you might lose all chance of being Darrell's sole
heir; your Sophy might forfeit the hateful claim to be the sole scion
on his ancient tree; but it is precisely by those losses that Lionel
Haughton might gain the bride he covets; and if this girl prove to be
what these Loselys affirm, that very marriage, which is now so repugnant
to Darrell, ought to insure his blessing. Were he himself to marry
again--had he rightful representatives and heirs in his own sons--he
should rejoice in the nuptials that secured to his