with the place, or even by those painful associations which made the spot
fatal to her. The time-old deserted mansion was still to her fancy a poem
in stone; and although she could not think about its unknown master
without a shudder, recalling her miserable delusion, she could not banish
his image from her thoughts, when she roamed about the park, or explored
the house, where the few old servants had grown fond of her and suffered
her to wander at will.

When she had spent an hour with Mrs. Rowse, she walked on to the Abbey,
and seated herself to eat her sandwiches and read her beloved Shelley
under the cedar beneath which she and the Wendover party had picnicked so
gaily on the day of her first visit. Shelley harmonized with her
thoughtful moods, for with most of his longer poems there is interwoven
that sense of wrong and sorrow, that idea of a life spoiled and blighted
by the oppression of stern social laws, which could but remind Ida of her
own entanglement. She had bound herself by a chain that could never be
broken, and here she read of how all noblest and grandest impulses are
above the law, and refuse to be so bound; and how, in such cases, it is
noble to defy and trample upon the law. A kind of heroic lawlessness,
spiritualized and diffused in a cloud of exquisite poetry, was what she
found in her Shelley; and it comforted her to know that before her time
there had been lofty souls caught in the web of their own folly.

When she was tired of reading she went into the Abbey. The great hall
door stood open to admit the summer air and sunshine. Ida wandered from
one room to another as freely as if she had been in her own house,
knowing that any servant she met would be pleased to see her there. The
old housekeeper was a devoted admirer of Miss Palliser; the two young
housemaids were her pupils in a class which met every Sunday afternoon
for study of the Scriptures. She had no fear of being considered an