When the mind is enfeebled by repeated blows, it often happens that some one, which to others may appear the slightest of all, produces the greatest effect, its pain being quite disproportioned to its real importance. Thus it happened, that, amidst all her trials, Winifred felt the loss of her father's favourite chair as a crowning misery, trivial as was that loss, when hope itself was lost. She had identified that very humble chattel with his figure almost her life long. She almost expected to see the two fair hands (for, truth to tell, the aged steward had never worked hard) on each side, and the venerable kind face projected forwards from its deep concave, arched over that white head, to smile welcome to her even as it stood out on the little green. The intrusion of boy clowns, one after another, into its seat seemed a grievous insult to the unhappy owner, though absent. Yet a sad comfort rose in the thought of her ability to reinstate her father in all his lost comforts, through this terrible marriage. Then she grew impatient in her longing to console him by assurance of this, notwithstanding his generous wish that her hand should go where he knew her heart had irretrievably been given. But these repeated disappointments in finding the parents she longed to fold to her bosom, postponing this little gratification, (the telling him she would repurchase the old family chair,) now quite overcame the fortitude she had till now exhibited. She sate down sick at heart--turned with aversion from the refreshment her fatigue required, and wept bitterly. Superstition, and two mysterious incidents, even while she remained on the hill, if indeed they were more than superstition's coinage, helped to depress her. Just before she reached this forlorn house with the haggard, aged, horrid-looking idiot prowling round it, with his rags fluttering in the wind, she thought that the figure of the hated steward and spy moved along a wild path on the opposite side of that great mountain cleft, traversed by a noisy torrent almost the depth of the whole hill, near the top of which this cottage was perched. His being there alone was nothing marvellous, but an ominous horror seemed, in her mind, to hover round that man, who (as if conscious of some deadly evil which was through him to overwhelm her some time) studiously avoided direct intercourse with his victim.