Both looked miserable: an additional shade of melancholy seemed to have gathered on Lord Fitzhenry’s countenance; and yet Emmeline was now certain that her rival was again in town, and that he passed with Lady Florence those hours which she now spent alone in Grosvenor-Street. For Emmeline felt it impossible to return to her former life; and, as there was no reason why she should, no one for whom she was called upon to make the exertion, she gave up what had already injured her health, both of mind and body. Emmeline’s temper even was not what it used to be; often, if Fitzhenry accidentally spoke to her, she answered him with asperity, and then the minute he had disappeared, she wept bitterly for her fault—for her offence towards love; longing for his return, that, on her knees, she might implore his forgiveness. Yet, when they again met, it was the same repulsive coldness on both sides. But if there can ever be an excuse for one gifted by nature with the blessing of a mild, gentle disposition, for giving way to irritation, Emmeline might plead it. Her heart was every way wounded; even Pelham she now dreaded; Mrs. Osterley’s hints eternally haunted her: if she caught his eye fixed upon her in anxious interest, her sick fancy took alarm, and the deep crimson in her cheeks betrayed apprehensions, which she wished to conceal even from herself. Tormented with this idea, she now shunned his society and conversation, as much as she had formerly sought it; for, although her extreme diffidence with regard to her own attractions, (a diffidence which her husband’s disregard of her had much increased,) her unsuspecting innocence, and simplicity of heart, would rather have led her to prize than avoid the attentions of an agreeable man, regardless of their raising suspicions in the breast of others, any more than in her own; yet, now being aware of what the world _could_ and _did_ say, that very innocence and simplicity made her fly from the least appearance of evil. She was not one of those to play off on a husband the arts of infidelity, in order, by jealousy, to rouse his feelings, and by the fear of wounded honour, to attract his attentions towards her. Fitzhenry cared not for her; but the vow of constancy which her lips had pronounced at the altar, and which was since engraven by strong affection on her heart, was too sacred in her estimation to allow even the uninterested world to suspect that she trifled with it. Her intercourse with Pelham being thus embittered, and her parents being the last to whom she could reveal her sorrows, she dragged on, in wretched solitude of heart, a listless, useless, aimless existence. The young, the gay, and the busy meantime bustled around her, careless of her unhappiness; or, if they sometimes observed its melancholy symptoms on her pale cheek, or in her heavy, absent eye, they only wondered “what could make Lady Fitzhenry so discontented, when she possessed every thing in the world to render her happy.”