Yet as weeks sped on, some thoughts troubled her repose. Gerard neither came nor wrote. At length she got a letter from Lady Cecil, congratulating her on Falkner's acquittal, and the kindness of her aunt; her letter was amiable, yet it was constrained; and Elizabeth, reading it again and again, and pondering on every expression, became aware that her friends felt less satisfaction than she did in the turn of fortune that placed her and Falkner together under her paternal roof. She had believed that, as Elizabeth Raby, Neville would at once claim her; but she was forced to recollect that Falkner was still at her side; and what intercourse could there be between him and his mother's destroyer? Thus anxiety and sadness penetrated poor Elizabeth's new-found paradise. She strove to appear the same, but she stole away, when she could, to meditate alone on her strange lot. It doubled her regret to think that Neville also was unhappy. She figured the struggles he underwent. She almost thought that, if he were happy, she could bear all. She remembered him as she last saw him, agitated and wretched--she alone, she felt sure, could calm--she alone minister happiness--and were they never more to meet? Falkner, who watched Elizabeth with all the jealousy of excessive affection, soon perceived the change. At first, her gayety had been spontaneous, her step free, her voice and laugh the very echo of joy: now, the forced smile, the frequent abstraction, the eagerness with which she watched for opportunities to steal into solitude, while her attentions to him became even more sedulous and tender; as if she wished to prove how ready she was to make every sacrifice for his sake--all these appearances he saw, and his heart ached to think how the effects of his errors still spread poison over his own life and that of one so dear. He felt sure that Mrs. Raby shared his uneasiness. She and her niece were much less together than before. Elizabeth could not speak of the thoughts that occupied her; and she could not feign with her dear, wise friend, whose eyes read her soul, and whose counsels or consolations she alike feared. Falkner saw Mrs. Raby's regards fix anxiously on her young relative; he penetrated her thoughts, and again he was forced to abhor himself as the destroyer of the happiness of all who came within his sphere.