Mr. Aylett was not wantonly or openly unkind to his ward, and

ungenerous persecution was utterly incompatible with the temper and

habits of his lady wife, but between them they had contrived to make

the girl's life very miserable. It was Winston's cue--adopted, let

us hope, from the strict sense of duty he avowed had ever actuated

him in his treatment of the charge bequeathed him by his father--to

deport himself with calm, seldom-relaxed severity to one who had

showed herself to be entirely unworthy of confidence; to exercise

unremitting surveillance upon her personal association with young

people out of the family and her correspondence, and to curb by look

and oral reproof the most distant approach to what he condemned as

indiscreet levity. In a thousand ways--many of them ingenious, and

all severe, she was made to feel the curtailment of her liberty, and

given to understand that it was the just retribution of her unlucky

love-affair with an unprincipled adventurer. Mrs. Aylett professed

to discountenance this policy--to be Mabel's secret friend and ally,

while she deemed it unwise to combat her husband's will by overt

measures for his sister's protection.

Thus, for a year, the object of his real displeasure and her

affected commiseration lived under a cloud, too proud to complain of

her thraldom, but feeling it every second; mourning, in the

seclusion of the trebly barred chambers of her heart, over her

shattered idol and squandered affections, and fancying, in the

morbid distrust engendered by the discovery of her lover's baseness,

and the weight of her brother's unsparing reprobation of her insane

imprudence, that she descried in every face, save Aunt Rachel's,

contempt or rebuke for the faux pas that had so nearly cast a stigma

upon her name and lineage.

In Herbert Dorrance's honest admiration and assiduous courtship the

most suspicious scrutiny could detect no tincture of either of these

feelings, and it was not long before she took refuge in his society

from the risk of being wounded and angered by the supposed

exhibition of them in others. Here was one man who could not but

know of her folly, in all its length, breadth, and depth, who was a

witness of her daily chastisement for it at her guardian's hands,

yet who esteemed her unsullied by the unworthy attachment,

undegraded by punishment. Gratitude had a powerful auxiliary in her

feverish longing to escape from scenes that kept alive to the quick,

memories she would have annihilated, had her ability been

commensurate with her will. All other associations with the house in

which she, and her father before her, had been born, and in which

she had passed her childhood and girlish days, were overrun by the

thickly thronging and pertinacious recollections of the two short

weeks Frederic Chilton had spent there with her. He haunted her

walks and drives; trod, by her side, the resounding floor of the

vine-covered portico, sat with her in parlor and halls; sang to her

accompaniment when she would have exorcised the phantom by

music--was always, whenever and wherever he appeared--the tender,

ingenuous, manly youth she had loved and reverenced as the

impersonation of her ideal lord; the demi-god whom she had

worshipped, heart and soul--set, in her exulting imagination no

lower than the angels, and beheld in the end,--with besmirched brow

and debased mien, a disgraced sensualist, not merely a deceiver of

another woman's innocent confidence, and her tempter to dishonor and

wretchedness, but a poltroon--a whipped coward who had not dared to

lift voice or pen in denial or extenuation of his crime.




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