After listening to all that the ablest of my professional brethren in the
metropolis could suggest to guide me, and trying in vain their remedies, I
brought back my charge to L----. Retaining my former residence for the
visits of patients, I engaged, for the privacy of my home, a house two
miles from the town, secluded in its own grounds, and guarded by high
walls.

Lilian's mother removed to my mournful dwelling-place. Abbot's House, in
the centre of that tattling coterie, had become distasteful to her, and to
me it was associated with thoughts of anguish and of terror. I could not,
without a shudder, have entered its grounds,--could not, without a stab at
the heart, have seen again the old fairy-land round the Monks' Well, nor
the dark cedar-tree under which Lilian's hand had been placed in mine; and
a superstitious remembrance, banished while Lilian's angel face had
brightened the fatal precincts, now revived in full force. The dying
man's curse--had it not been fulfilled?

A new occupant for the old house was found within a week after Mrs.
Ashleigh had written from London to a house-agent at L----, intimating her
desire to dispose of the lease. Shortly before we had gone to Windermere,
Miss Brabazon had become enriched by a liberal life-annuity bequeathed to
her by her uncle, Sir Phelim. Her means thus enabled her to move from the
comparatively humble lodging she had hitherto occupied to Abbot's House;
but just as she had there commenced a series of ostentatious
entertainments, implying an ambitious desire to dispute with Mrs. Poyntz
the sovereignty of the Hill, she was attacked by some severe malady which
appeared complicated with spinal disease, and after my return to L---- I
sometimes met her, on the spacious platform of the Hill, drawn along
slowly in a Bath chair, her livid face peering forth from piles of Indian