packed up. I shall return to England to-morrow."

That was perhaps the longest speech Lord Montfort ever addressed to his
wife; perhaps it was also the rudest. From that time he regarded her as
some Spaniard of ancient days might regard a guest on whom he was
compelled to bestow the rights of hospitality--to whom he gave a seat at
his board, a chair at his hearth, but for whom he entertained a profound
aversion, and kept at invincible distance, with all the ceremony of
dignified dislike. Once only during her wedded life Caroline again saw
Darrell. It was immediately on her return to England, and little more
than a month after her marriage. It was the day on which Parliament had
been prorogued preparatory to its dissolution--the last Parliament of
which Guy Darrell was a member. Lady Montfort's carriage was detained in
the throng with which the ceremonial had filled the streets, and Darrell
passed it on horseback. It was but one look in that one moment; and the
look never ceased to haunt her--a look of such stern disdain, but also of
such deep despair. No language can exaggerate the eloquence which there
is in a human countenance, when a great and tortured spirit speaks out
from it accusingly to a soul that comprehends. The crushed heart, the
ravaged existence, were bared before her in that glance, as clearly as to
a wanderer through the night are the rents of the precipice in the flash
of the lightning. So they encountered--so, without a word, they parted.
To him that moment decided the flight from active life to which his
hopeless thoughts had of late been wooing the jaded, weary man. In
safety to his very conscience, he would not risk the certainty thus to
encounter one whom it convulsed his whole being to remember was another's
wife. In that highest and narrowest sphere of the great London world to
which Guy Darrell's political distinction condemned his social life, it
was impossible but that he should be brought frequently into collision
with Lord Montfort, the Head of a House with which Darrell himself was