be fruitless--be fatal? If Lionel were really now adopted by Darrell,
Waife knew human nature too well to believe that Darrell would
complacently hear Lionel ask a wife in her whose claim to his lineage had
so galled and incensed him. It was while plunged in these torturing
reflections that Lady Montfort (not many minutes after Sophy's song had
ceased and her form vanished) had come to visit him, and he at once
accosted her with agitated inquiries: "When had Mr. Haughton first
presented himself?--how often had he seen Sophy?--what had passed between
them?--did not Lady Montfort see that his darling's heart was breaking?"

But he stopped as suddenly as he had rushed into his thorny maze of
questions; for, looking imploringly into Caroline Montfort's face, he saw
there more settled signs of a breaking heart than Sophy had yet betrayed,
despite her paleness and her sighs. Sad, indeed, the change in her
countenance since he had left the place months ago, though Waife,
absorbed in Sophy, had not much remarked it till now, when seeking to
read therein secrets that concerned his darling's welfare. Lady
Montfort's beauty was so perfect in that rare harmony of feature which
poets, before Byron, have compared to music, that sorrow could no more
mar the effect of that beauty on the eye, than pathos can mar the effect
of the music that admits it on the ear. But the change in her face
seemed that of a sorrow which has lost all earthly hope. Waife,
therefore, checked questions that took the tone of reproaches, and
involuntarily murmured "Pardon."

Then Caroline Montfort told him all the tender projects she had conceived
for his grandchild's happiness--how, finding Lionel so disinterested and
noble, she had imagined she saw in him the providential agent to place
Sophy in the position to which Waife had desired to raise her; Lionel, to
share with her the heritage of which he might otherwise despoil her--both