from others. How shall I express her womanly terror, her loving,
sympathizing pity, on hearing the tale, which I softened as well as I
could?

"And to think that I knew nothing of this!" she cried, clasping my hand;
"to think that you were in peril, and that I was not by your side!"

Her mother spoke of Margrave, as a visitor,--an agreeable, lively
stranger; Lilian could not even recollect his name, but she seemed shocked
to think that any visitor had been admitted while I was in circumstances
so awful! Need I say that our engagement was renewed? Renewed! To her
knowledge and to her heart it had never been interrupted for a moment.
But oh! the malignity of the wrong world! Oh, that strange lust of
mangling reputations, which seizes on hearts the least wantonly cruel!
Let two idle tongues utter a tale against some third person, who never
offended the babblers, and how the tale spreads, like fire, lighted none
know how, in the herbage of an American prairie! Who shall put it out?

What right have we to pry into the secrets of other men's hearths? True
or false, the tale that is gabbled to us, what concern of ours can it be?
I speak not of cases to which the law has been summoned, which law has
sifted, on which law has pronounced. But how, when the law is silent, can
we assume its verdicts? How be all judges where there has been no
witness-box, no cross-examination, no jury? Yet, every day we put on our
ermine, and make ourselves judges,--judges sure to condemn, and on what
evidence? That which no court of law will receive. Somebody has said
something to somebody, which somebody repeats to everybody!

The gossip of L---- had set in full current against Lilian's fair name.
No ladies had called or sent to congratulate Mrs. Ashleigh on her return,