harsh, was soured; he avenged his affront by a thousand petty tyrannies;
and, without a murmur, Alice perhaps in those years of rank and opulence
suffered more than in all her wanderings, with love at her heart and her
infant in her arms.

Evelyn was to be the heiress to the wealth of the banker. But the
_title_ of the new peer!--if he could unite wealth and title, and set the
coronet on that young brow! This had led him to seek the alliance with
Lumley. And on his death-bed, it was not the secret of Alice, but that
of Mary Westbrook and his daughter, which he had revealed to his dismayed
and astonished nephew, in excuse for the apparently unjust alienation of
his property, and as the cause of the alliance he had sought.

While her husband, if husband he might be called, lived, Alice had seemed
to bury in her bosom her regret--deep, mighty, passionate, as it was--for
her lost child, the child of the unforgotten lover, to whom, through such
trials, and amid such new ties, she had been faithful from first to last.
But when once more free, her heart flew back to the far and lowly grave.
Hence her yearly visits to Brook-Green; hence her purchase of the
cottage, hallowed by memories of the dead. There, on that lawn, had she
borne forth the fragile form, to breathe the soft noontide air; there, in
that chamber, had she watched and hoped, and prayed and despaired; there,
in that quiet burial-ground, rested the beloved dust! But Alice, even in
her holiest feelings, was not selfish: she forbore to gratify the first
wish of her heart till Evelyn's education was sufficiently advanced to
enable her to quit the neighbourhood; and then, to the delight of Aubrey
(who saw in Evelyn a fairer, and nobler, and purer Eleanor), she came to
the solitary spot, which, in all the earth, was the _least_ solitary to
her!