The state of Eleanor's mind when these awful tidings were communicated to her, which they were by her father, in his agitation and anger, without the least preparation, we leave our readers to imagine. Hardened, heartless, willful as she was, she was still a woman, and a very young one, and till Captain Fortescue appeared, had loved, as far as it was in her nature, Lord Fitzclair. To believe that she had nothing to do with his miserable end was an attempt so vain and hollow, that even she shrunk from the hopeless struggle to realize it; remorse in all its torturing, unmitigated anguish took possession of her, but instead of leading her to penitence, and thence the hope of peace, it urged her to a course of action from which she imagined there was no withdrawing; and which must in time, by removing her from all painful associations, lessen her present misery. For three days and nights she never quitted her own apartment, and then joined her usual circles without the smallest evidence of the internal agony which was still hers. It was very easy to displace paleness by artificial roses, and her gay smiles and joyous sallies were tempered only by a judiciously-expressed horror when the late event was discussed before her, supposed natural to one who had known him so intimately; but the hours of loneliness which followed this conduct in society were terrible indeed. By a strange contrariety of feeling, her better nature longed for Emmeline, and her artificial, which had, alas! only too forcibly become her natural self, felt as if she would leave the kingdom rather than encounter the mild, sorrowful glance of those penetrating eyes. Lord Delmont was himself in a most pitiable condition; even minor evils had always been great to him, and the effect of this, the wish to take Eleanor away from Captain Fortescue's increased and annoying attentions, and yet the dread that doing so would connect her with Fitzclair's death, so distracted him as to render him really ill--information which instantly brought Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton to Cheltenham. Some young wives and mothers might have felt it hard that their domestic enjoyment should so continually have been disturbed and annoyed from the faults of others; but Emmeline had been accustomed to trace every thing that created personal suffering to the highest source, and feel that it was good for her, or it would not be; a conviction that enabled her to bear with and still to love the erring one that was the visible cause of pain.