"Curse on you, hag!" exclaimed Houseman, dashing her to the ground with a rude brutality, "you love me! Pah! My child,--my little Jane,--my pretty Jane,--my merry Jane,--my innocent Jane--I will seek her instantly-- instantly; what's money? what's ease,--if--if--" And the father, wretch, ruffian as he was, stung to the core of that last redeeming feeling of his dissolute nature, struck his breast with his clenched hand, and rushed from the room--from the house. CHAPTER VII. MADELINE, HER HOPES.--A MILD AUTUMN CHARACTERISED. --A LANDSCAPE.--A RETURN. 'Tis late, and cold--stir up the fire, Sit close, and draw the table nigher; Be merry and drink wine that's old, A hearty medicine 'gainst a cold, Welcome--welcome shall fly round! --Beaumont and Fletcher: Song in the Lover's Progress. As when the Great Poet,-- Escaped the Stygian pool, though long detained In that obscure sojourn; while, in his flight Through utter and through middle darkness borne, He sang of chaos, and eternal night:-- As when, revisiting the "Holy Light, offspring of heaven first-born," the sense of freshness and glory breaks upon him, and kindles into the solemn joyfulness of adjuring song: so rises the mind from the contemplation of the gloom and guilt of life, "the utter and the middle darkness," to some pure and bright redemption of our nature--some creature of "the starry threshold," "the regions mild of calm and serene air." Never was a nature more beautiful and soft than that of Madeline Lester--never a nature more inclined to live "above the smoke and stir of this dim spot, which men call earth"--to commune with its own high and chaste creations of thought--to make a world out of the emotions which this world knows not-- a paradise, which sin, and suspicion, and fear, had never yet invaded-- where God might recognise no evil, and Angels forebode no change.