"Gone away--left me--gone away for ever!" and as the thought of his desolation broke with renewed force upon him, his voice nearly failed him, and it was with great difficulty that he prevented himself from breaking down. "Left you--gone away--eloped!" cried the old lady, in whose mind there suddenly arose a vision of a yellow post-chaise, with four horses and two postillions, and Barbara inside, with Captain Lyster looking out of the window. "No, no; not so bad as that," said Frank; "though horrible enough, in all conscience;" and he gave his mother a description of the scene which had occurred. As Mrs. Churchill listened, it was plain to see that she was greatly moved; her hands trembled, and tears burst from her eyes and stole down her cheeks. As the story proceeded, two feelings were struggling for the mastery within her--one, pity for her son; the other, indignation at her son's wife. The old lady, although now so quiet and retiring and simple, had lived in the world, and knew the ways and doings, the ins and outs, of its denizens. She had had tolerable experience of man's inconstancy, of his proneness to sin, of his exposure to flattery, and liability to temptation. Had Frank confessed some slight flirtation with a pretty girl, some beneficence towards a female acquaintance of bygone times, she would have thought that Barbara had acted with worse than rashness in taking so decided a step; but now, when Frank told her that the letter which had provoked the final eruption was one which--had he not been pledged by its writer to be silent concerning, pledge given long before he had made Barbara's acquaintance--might have been read before the world, she believed her son fully, and could form no judgment too severe on Barbara's conduct. She was no vain-glorious Pharisee, to tell of the tithes she had given, the good she had done; no humbler-minded sinner poured out a nightly tale of shortcomings and omissions to the Great Father: but when she thought of her own married life, when she recollected all Vance Churchill's frailties, all his drinking bouts and intrigues, all his carelessness and idleness, his neglect of his wife his pettish waywardness, and constant self-indulgence; when she compared all this with Frank's calm, steady, laborious, good life, and recollected that under all her provocation her husband had scarcely so much as a harsh word from her, she felt that Barbara's conduct had been outrageous indeed.