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CHAPTER XX.

"Call you this a quiz?" said my uncle, "in my day it would have been called a lie."

Plain Dealer.

MISS CAMPBELL valued herself on never feeling or doing any thing by halves-she had taken a decided liking to Ellen-with her cordial admiration there mingled a little of the pride of a discoverer: a complacent sense of the merit of having first felt Miss Bruce's attractions, and asserted her claims. She attached herself almost exclusively to her, and Westall was delighted to observe after dinner that Ellen, instead of retiring immediately to her own room as usual, accompanied Miss Campbell and her party to the drawing Miss Redwood observed that he was following them-she beckoned to him and said, "be good enough to tell Miss Deborah, that during my ride this morning I met her neighbour Martin. I stopped him to inquire after the Lenoxes. He told me they were all well excepting old Mrs. Allen, who is very ill and afraid she shall not live to see her grandchild.”

room.

Westall went as unwillingly as ever schoolboy crept to school to deliver a message which must

hasten Ellen's departure. Fitzgerald had overheard the communication, and looked at Caroline inquisitively.

"A ruse de guerre," she whispered. "It is such a bore to meet that giant Miss Debby and her suite at every turn, that I have tasked my invention to get rid of them."

"Oh, a quiz, admirable-skill against ignorance-the only mode of warfare with savages. 'Pon honour, Miss Redwood, I cannot imagine how you have survived your exile among those barbarians. The condition of society in these northern states is quite terrible-insufferable to those whose felicity it has been to live where the natural distinctions of rank are preserved."

"I assure you, Captain Fitzgerald, I was excessively annoyed. I found it quite impossible to make those people feel they were not my equals."

"Your equals! good heavens! had the animals organs, senses, affections, passions'! Would to heaven," he added, lowering his voice, "Miss Redwood would consent to go where the eye and the heart will confess that she has no equal."

"That would be heaven indeed!" replied Caroline, turning her eye on Fitzgerald with an expression that authorised his most daring hopes.

"Yes, heaven,” he replied, "not a puritanical heaven of liberty and equality, but a place where beauty, rank, and fashion, are far above this plebeian fog-a place worthy of you, Miss Redwood, where

had misunderstood his daughter's sentiments in relation to him, he made a manly avowal of his attachment to Ellen, and related, with such reserves as a lover would be apt to make, the events and conversation of the morning of her departure from Eton.

Mr. Redwood was quite unprepared for this communication, for though his acquaintance with Ellen Bruce, and his vigilant observation of Westall, had shaken the dominion of his long cherished dogma of the selfishness of his race, and though he had of late much inclined to believe there were principles that might modify and control this selfishness; yet it seemed to him utterly ineredible that a young man without fortune, without patronage, and with talents to generate ambition, should forego the brilliant advantages of an alliance with his daughter, for the sake of pure love, such as he had deemed only existed in romances and poetry, and was almost too obsolete to obtain a place there.

He received Westall's disclosure with an intense interest. Admiration for his young friend, and bitter disappointment at the utter defeat of his own projects, struggled for the mastery: he remained silent till Westall said, "you may deem my hopes presumptuous, sir, but you cannot, I am certain, think them dishonourable to me."

"Dishonourable! no, my dear Charles-my only wonder is that you have fallen in love with a poor little girl who has nothing but the best

heart in the world to give you-dishonourable ! would to God my youth had been rectified by the principle that governs yours."

Memory and conscience were busy, and sent their witness into Redwood's pallid cheek. "Westall, I am a miserable man-life has no attractions-no consolations for me-death no repose. I had a deep thirst for happiness-my spirit soared above the vulgar pleasures of the world, but I have fettered-wasted-degraded it; and now I suffer the fierce pangs of remorse for the past-of despair for the future. Westall, there is a misery for which language has no expression, in approaching the grave with the consciousness of having lost the noble ends for which life was given.

"Had I been borne along, as thousands are, like a leaf upon the waters and left no trace behind, I should have comparative peace; but”—he folded his hands upon his breast-"I have dispossessed this temple of the divinity for which it was formed, I have destroyed the innocent-contaminated the pure-and my child-my only child-the immortal creature whose destiny was entrusted to me, I have permitted to be nursed in folly, and devoted to the world without a moral principle or influence !"

The wild melancholy of Redwood's countenance, and the import of his language, alarmed Westall:-" let me beseech you, sir," said he, "to to be more composed-your strength is unequal to VOL. II.

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the agitation of your spirits-you know not what you are saying."

"Not know what I am saying," he replied, with a bitter smile: "oh Westall, I am wearied with the dreary solitude of my own mind-the spirit of your father, young man, is in your facehis gentleness in your heart: I must have your sympathy, your aid—if indeed relief is possible. I have sought relief here," he continued, drawing a bible from beneath his pillow, "this was the gift of your sweet Ellen. At midnight and in secresy I have explored its pages-and I believe its record is true at least I am inclined to believe it; but when the evidence of its divine original forces its way to my convictions, the arguments and the ridicule of infidelity recur to my mind, and the habits of skepticism hold it in suspense. And if it be true, its decisions are against me-its promises are all to the pious, the upright, and the benevolent."

"And is there no promise to the penitent?" asked Westall. "Believe me, this book contains the provisions of a father for his children; and there is no condition of the human mind, no modification of human destiny, which they cannot reach."

"Do not, Charles, make me the dupe of my necessities; do not send the light of hope into my mind, to render the darkness that shall succeed more horrible. Of what avail can be that penitence into which we are scourged by the fear of the future? Charles, I have already gone too far