As soon as she was alone with her daughter, the widow lady gazed round the chamber in which she sat with a thoughtful and melancholy look. She was in the house where her early days of girlhood had passed--she was in the very room where she had gone in all the agitation of happy love as a bride to the altar. She peopled the place with forms that could no longer be seen, she called up the loved and the dead, the parents who had cherished and instructed her, the fair sister who had bloomed and withered by her side. How many happy, how many a painful scene rose to the eye of memory on that stage where they had been enacted. All the material objects were the same, the pictures, the furniture, the old oak paneling with its carved wreaths; but where were they who moved so lately beside her in that chamber--where was all that had there been done? The grave and the past--man's tomb, and the tomb of man's actions had received them, and in the short space of twenty years all had gone, fading away and dissolving into air like a smoke rising up unto heaven, and spreading out thinner and thinner, till naught remains. Herself and a brother, from whom many circumstances had detached her, were all that were left of the crowd of happy faces that remembrance called back as she sat there and gazed around. Some tears rose to her eyes, and Mary who had been standing by gazing at her face, and reading in it with the quick appreciation of affection all the emotions which brought such shadows over the loved mother's brow, knelt down beside her, and taking her hand in hers said earnestly, "Mamma, dear mamma, I know this is painful, but pray for my sake and Isabella's let the shameful deceit that has been played upon us produce a good and happy result. You are here in my uncle's house; be reconciled to him fully, I beseech you. You know that he is good-humoured notwithstanding all his faults, and I cannot but think that if those who might have led him to better things had not withdrawn from him so completely, he might now have been a different man." Mrs. Clifford shook her head mournfully. "My dear child," she said, "you know that it is not resentment; it was your good father who did not feel it consistent with his character and station to countenance all that takes place here." "But for Isabella's sake," said Miss Clifford, earnestly, and before her mother could answer, the young lady of whom she spoke re-entered the room with a servant carrying some refreshments.