peace with God; and, before night--black pools--rock precipices, fearful as Leucadia's--mortal plants, and even the horrid knife and halter--floated before her mind's eye without her trembling, even like terrible, yet kind, ministrants proffering escape--escape from legalised violation!--escape from _perjury_, to her, the self-doomed Iphigenia! For her morbid fancy, whispered to by her intense tenderness, conjured up that dilemma between faith broken to her lover and abandonment of a dear parent to his fate. Despair suggested that self-destruction itself might seem venial, even before God, when rushed upon as the only alternative to perjury--to prostitution; for such her romantic purity taught her to consider submission to the embrace of any living man except her heart's own--her affianced--"her beautiful!"--her lost! Such were the feelings under whose influence our humble heroine pursued her mountain journey, of a few miles, to the place of meeting with her parents; and it was probably beneath the roof of the lone cottage in the cloud that, under the same morbid mood of mind, she penned a letter to Mr Fitzarthur, which was afterwards discovered, dated at top "My Wedding Day," containing a passionate appeal on behalf of her father, for a bond of legal indemnification to be executed before night, as a present which she had set her heart on giving her father, as a bridal one, _that very day_. Arrived at the house fitted up for the hated supplanter of her father, "Lewis the Spy," her heart beat so violently before she could firm her nerves to ring the bell, that she stood leaning some time against the wall. This old house was now almost rebuilt, and not without regard to rural beauty, in harmony with the fine scenery of an antique park, with its mossy ivied remains of walls and venerable trees overshadowing it, and was called "The Little Hall of the Park." She sighed deeply as she glanced at its comfortable aspect, remembering how long it had formed the secret object of her mother's little ambition (for the dame had a touch of pride in her composition beyond her ever-contented mate) to occupy that _little_ hall. It seemed so appropriate that the lesser squire--the _great_ squire's friend--should also have _his_ "hall," though a little one! Indeed, it had been in incipient repair for him, that the old men might spend their winter evenings together at the real hall, divided but by a short path, across an angle of the park, without a dreary walk for Bevan impending over the end of their carouse, with never-wearied reminiscences of their boyhood--when sudden death stopped all proceedings, and left poor Bevan alone in the world, as it seemed to him--"in simplicity a child," and as imbecile in conflict with it as any child.