But she was wretched—most wretched—because hopeless. She had prayed for a child, with all the yearning eagerness of disappointed craving womanhood—a child that should smile in her face, and love her for herself, being of herself, and her own—a child that should perhaps win back to her the lost affections of her lord. But in vain. And still she loved him, nay, adored him, as of old. Never did she see his stately form, sitting his horse with habitual grace, approaching listlessly and slowly the home which no longer had a single attraction to his jaded and exhausted heart, but her whole frame was shaken by a sharp nervous tremor, but a mist overspread her swimming eyes, but dull ringing filled her ears, her heart throbbed and palpitated, until she thought it would burst forth from her bosom. She ever hoped that the cold spell might pass from him, ever believed, ever trusted, that the time would come when he would again love her as of old, again seek her society, and take pleasure in her conversation; again let her nestle in his bosom, and look up into his answering eyes, by the quiet fireside in winter evenings. Alas! she still dreamed of these things—even although her reason told her that they were hopeless—even after he had again changed his mood from sullen coldness to harsh, irritable anger, to vehement, impetuous, fiery wrath, causeless as the wolf’s against the lamb, and _therefore_ the more deadly and unsparing. Politics had run high in the land of late, and every where parties were forming. Since the battle of Sedgemoor, and the merciless cruelty with which the royal judges had crushed out the life of that abortive insurrection, and drowned its ashes in floods of innocent gore, the rage of factions had waxed wilder in the country than they had done since the reign of the first Charles, the second English king of that unhappy race, the last of whom now filled the painful seat of royalty. Yet all was hushed as yet and quiet, as the calm which precedes the bursting of a thunder-cloud. Secluded as Widecomb Manor was, and far divided from the seats of the other gentry of Devonshire by tracts of moor and forest, and little intercourse as Jasper had held hitherto with his equals in rank and birth—limited as that intercourse had been to a few visits of form, and a few annual banquets—the stir of the political world reached even the remote House in the Woods. The mad whirl of politics was precisely the thing to captivate a mind such as Jasper’s; and the instant the subject was broached to him, by some of the more leading youths of the county, he plunged headlong into its deepest vortices, and was soon steeped to the lips in conspiracy.