Mrs. Hamilton sat for a very long time alone after she had left Ellen. Ellis's words returned to her again and again so pertinaciously, that she could not break from them. Edward! the cause of it all--could it be possible?--could it be, that he had plunged himself into difficulties, and afraid to appeal to his uncle or her, had so worked on Ellen as not only to make her send relief, but actually so to keep his secret, as to endure every thing rather than betray it? Circumstance after circumstance, thought after thought, so congregated upon her, so seemed to burst into being, and flash light one from the other, that her mind ached beneath their pressure. Ellen's unhappiness the day his last letter had been received, her sudden illness--had it taken place before or after Robert had lost the money? She could not satisfy herself, for her husband's sudden summons to Feroe, hasty preparations, and departure, had rendered all the month confused and unsatisfactory in its recollections. So intense was the relief of the idea, that Mrs. Hamilton feared to encourage it, lest it should prove a mere fancy, and urge softer feelings toward her niece than ought to be. Even the supposition made her heart yearn toward her with such a feeling of love, almost of veneration, for the determined self-devotion, so essentially woman's characteristic, that she resolutely checked its ascendency. All her previous fancies, that Ellen was no ordinary child, that early suffering and neglect had, while they produced some childish faults, matured and deepened the capabilities of endurance and control, from the consciousness (or rather existence, for it was not the consciousness to the child herself) of strong feeling, returned to her, as if determined to confirm Ellis's supposition. The disappearance of her allowance; her assertion, that she was seeking Mrs. Langford's cottage, by that shorter but forbidden path, to try and get her to dispose of her trinkets, when the wind blew the notes to her hand--all now seemed connected one with the other, and confirmed. She could well understand, how in a moment of almost madness they might have been used without thought, and the after-effect upon so delicate a mind and conscience. Then, in contradiction to all this (a mere hypothesis raised on nothing firmer than Ellis's supposition), came the constantly favorable accounts of Edward; his captain's pride and confidence in him; the seeming impossibility that he could get into such difficulties, and what were they? The name of Harding rushed on her mind, she knew not why or how--but it made her tremble, by its probable explanation of the whole. A coarse or even less refined mind, would have either appealed at once to Ellen, as to the truth of this suspicion, or thought herself justified in looking over all Edward's letters to his sister, as thus to discover the truth; but in Mrs. Hamilton's pure mind the idea never even entered, though all her niece's papers and letters were in her