least some others to whom the knowledge of Waife's innocence was
imperatively due.

Waife is seated by his open window. It is noon; there is sunshine in the
pale blue skies--an unusual softness in the wintry air. His Bible lies
on the table beside him. He has just set his mark in the page, and
reverently closed the book. He is alone. Lady Montfort--who, since her
return from Fawley, has been suffering from a kind of hectic fever,
accompanied by a languor that made even the walk to Waife's cottage a
fatigue, which the sweetness of her kindly nature enabled her to
overcome, and would not permit her to confess--has been so much worse
that morning as to be unable to leave her room. Sophy has gone to see
her. Waife is now leaning his face upon his hand, and that face is
sadder and more disquieted than it lead been, perhaps, in all his
wanderings. His darling Sophy is evidently unhappy. Her sorrow had not
been visible during the first two or three days of his return, chased
away by the joy of seeing himthe excitement of tender reproach and
question--of tears that seemed as joyous as the silvery laugh which
responded to the gaiety that sported round the depth of feeling with
which he himself beheld her once more clinging to his side, or seated,
with upward loving eyes, on the footstool by his knees. Even at the
first look, however, he had found her altered; her cheek was thinner,
her colour paled. That might be from fretting for him. She would be
herself again, now that her tender anxiety was relieved. But she did not
become herself again. The arch and playful Sophy he had left was gone,
as if never to return. He marked that her step, once so bounding, had
become slow and spiritless. Often when she sat near him, seemingly
reading or at her work, he noticed that her eyes were not on the page--
that the work stopped abruptly in listless hands; and then he would hear
her sigh--a heavy but short impatient sigh! No mistaking that sigh by