his present anger, or looked dead, and blank, and motionless, as if the external world was all forgotten. As he continued to write, weakness at times compelled him to suspend his task; but after each pause, though his attenuated hand seemed trembling with the very touch of death, he rallied his failing powers, and yielded wholly to the most baleful feelings in their last struggle for the mastery. Dr. Milman, whenever he recalled his image in these moments, likened him to a dying gladiator, who, regardless of his own approaching dissolution, set every nerve to accomplish the destruction of his opponent. He presented his letter unsealed to Dr. Milman, charging him to read, seal, and deliver it at his leisure. Dr. Milman undertook to read it in Mr. Cressingham's presence, in order to gain time, which he trusted would be favourable to a better state of mind than his looks and words had hitherto indicated. But the perusal of the letter went far to extinguish the faint glimmering of hope he had tried to keep alive on the subject. The following were its contents: MR. CRESSINGHAM'S LETTER TO MR. LANGHAM. "Forgive you !-You, the false friend!--the base betrayer! Yes!--as the sparrow does the falcon within whose grasp it dies or as the lamb the treacherous wolf that lures him from the fold to be devoured!--Forgive you You know not what you ask! I could not pardon if I would. "Forgiveness!-Holy men have taught it, and holy books instilled it; and while listening to the one, or studying the other, I too have pronounced it. Yes, for many long, miserable years I said I had forgiven you, and I believed myself! But the sight of you (oh! that I had been spared it!) has wrung this error from me. I cannot now, sir, say it. Attempt not once to see me, lest I pray to Heaven for its heaviest infliction on your false and faithless heart,--and for her sake, hers in whose name you dare to plead, I would not do this. But you have had sufferings. I am a dying man, sir, yet they move me not, for I recollect my own. recollect that when fortune, health, youth, and hope, were fast declining, I had one only blessing that bound me to the earth. Oh! that I could but make you conceive the sting of memory now, or the pang of madness then!" I 585509B Dr. Milman turned towards Mr. Cressingham to admonish him. It was too late! the unhappy man seized the hands of Dr. Milman, and strove to speak; but the accents gurgled in his throat. He threw himself violently forward, as if struggling with internal agony, but in a moment fell back on his pillow. The heart that had beat so recently with such violence of emotion, was now still! He who had dwelt so much on the miseries of this world, was snatched from it altogether! 1 . CHAPTER XXXII. Methought the billows spoke and told me of it; How bitter are upbraidings when no internal monitor tells us they are undeserved,--when our endeavours to persuade ourselves that they are harsh, unfeeling, or exaggerated, sink beneath the fiat of truth, and we are compelled to acknowledge, whatever of pain or of contumely may be heaped upon us, that we have deserved it all! Mr. Langham had now presented to his mind not an absolutely new view of another chain of consequences, arising from his conduct, but one tinged with a deeper and a truer colouring than had been ever yet given to it. A human heart corroded by vengeance was laid before him, with whose last pulsations execrations of him had been mingled. Whatever he had done in the way of atonement,-whatever he might do, could not avert this; and as he sunk in agony on his bed, he prayed that he might either never again experience a sensation so dreadful, or never rise again. But " a tree doth live long after rottenness hath eat away its core," and Mr. Langham, long after he had become callous to enjoyment, when serious and rational pleasures had ceased to charm, and warm, and pure affections to delight him, was destined to exist. He slowly recovered from the shock occasioned by Mr. Cressingham's death; but life, that blessing in itself, however limited the means of enjoying it, had become to him a curse. Remorse, that like the Promethean vulture diminishes not the vitality of its prey, dwelt in his heart, and fed on the most painful and oppressive recollections. "He is dead, and I have killed him!" was the prevailing thought in his mind,-"O that I could die!" the prayer for ever on his lips. His children were variously affected by his illness and the state of his mind. Jeannette grieved that he was ill, for she fondly loved him; but this sorrow hid another and a deeper, of which she never spoke. Matilda, in active attendance on her father, with no present thought but to anticipate his wishes and watch over him, suffered less than might have been expected from the tenderness of her disposition. Her mind had felt too keenly once, to be much affected by any collateral circumstance dependent on the same melancholy fact. To Matilda, it was of little moment that the pyramid of calumny should be raised afresh over the name of Langham at Cheltenham cr elsewhere; but it had been, and still was, a source of severe anguish to her that it ever had been piled and could not be o'erthrown. Hamond's suffering was of a different nature, for he was shocked and scandalized at the publicity thus given to their name and history. He knew enough of the world to be aware that all tongues would talk their bitterest. The meeting between his father and Mr. Cressingham, and the death of the latter, with the suppression only of the names, found their way into the public papers. He tried to stop its progress, as far as he could, and in some degree succeeded. He begged too of Doctor Milman to be his agent, and endeavour to serve Mr. Cressingham's family in every way possible. But his heart was heavy, and he would sometimes take Jeannette on his knee when he saw her dispirited and unhappy, and weep over her, and with her, in agony of heart. Sir William Sherrard was unremitting in his visits and attentions: he had never before appeared so amiable to Hamond, and even Jeannette was pleased and softened by his evident anxiety for her father. It was from him too she first heard of Lindsay Bathurst's sudden departure from Cheltenham, "on urgent and indispensable business," as Sir William undertook to assert. And though the bearer of unwelcome news has generally but a losing office, she liked Sir William Sherrard when he made that simple assertion, better than she had ever done before, or ever did again. It was a vague answer to a sleepless question in her heart, which her lip refused to utter,and when first she heard it, it seemed satisfactory, for it served as the root for many a fair budding and flourishing conjecture. "Visions that arise without a sleep," sprang ceaselessly from it, and for a time consoled her. But when, day after day, week after week passed away and he came not,-when her heart could no longer deceive itself,-when Hamond's first letter, after parting from her, stated that "Captain Bathurst had quitted the army and was going abroad," the chill of an agonized fear came over her. "Did he not then love me?" seemed to be uttered by a thousand voices within her; and torrents of tears, which she attempted not to control, were the only answers to an inquiry in which her life was bound up. Her imagination aided cruelly in harrowing her heart, for she transferred to all its deeper feelings the attribute of infinity. It seemed to her, when in sorrow, that sorrow could never end. Her afflictions, "boundless as the sea, her love as deep," when tossed into tempest, rejected all things that were not of themselves;--nothing unconnected with them excited in her a moment's interest. She did not, however, shrink from effort: at first she prayed frequently and ardently to be enabled to forget one who had created for her such insufferable misery; but the prayer was no sooner breathed than she denounced herself for a wish so inhuman, so unnatural, and resolved by occupation only to temper the acuteness of remembrance. She turned to books--books that had been her early passionthe improvers, the refiners of her mind; but their pages were as blanks to her eyes; her faculties were too entirely preoccupied to perform her bidding. Some opinion of Lindsay Bathurst's some dangerous recollection of how he had looked, or what he had said, obtruded on her mind and wholly absorbed it. Repeated failures aggravated her distress. Jeannette had yet to learn that the first steps of virtuous endeavour are ever difficult, ever full of pain. She did not know that this is necessary, in order that we may know the importance of the task we have undertaken, and practically learn the immense exertion requisite on our own parts towards the subjugation of the will and discipline of the heart. She tried her harp, but this was worse than all: Lindsay Bathurst's voice started in full melody from the strings. Again and again she touched the same chords to bring back the illusion; but it came no more. The disappointment affected her powerfully she felt as if pursued by misfortune, with none to pity or to save her; and these words came to her heart (for in distress words do come, though the lip can seldom pronounce them), "like himself! like himself!--that false voice lured me to hope! O that he had rather taught me to die!" She drew her harp towards her, and took no note of time, as she thus sat musing in silent and tearless agony. Her father and Matilda entered before she removed. “A ́silent harp, my best love, or an idle performer, which?" said Mr. Langham, as he affectionately kissed her. "Play something to me, Jeannette." She obeyed her father; but Matilda, who was watching her, saw that through the whole of the performance her tears fell like rain over her dress and the gilding of the harp. Matilda had before this remarked her unhappiness, her assumption of activity and interest when she thought herself observed, and her look of inward wretchedness when in her abstraction she forgot that any one was near her. She was afraid of revolting her by asking her confidence, but she strove by many indirect ways to win it. She mentioned Captain Bathurst's name at one time with praise, to sooth; at another, with blame, to rouse her, and always with the same il success. Jeannette had neither courage nor inclination to lay before Matilda her chain of evidence in favour of the belief she had indulged. She was perhaps aware that the far greater part of it consisted in manner, which may be felt and understood, but cannot easily be detailed. Matilda afterward tried the efficacy of gentle reproaches, but she was soon compelled to desist. "You really do nothing, my dear Jeannette; I wish I could see you employ yourself as you used to do. You have played over that prelude till I am tired of hearing it. Do try to proceed." Jeannette had that morning made great efforts not to seem, |