Two girls and a boy were the fruits of this union. Lady Helen had made a great many excellent resolutions with regard to their rearing and education, which she eagerly confided to Mrs. Hamilton, but when the time of trial came, weakness and false indulgence so predominated, that Grahame, to counteract these evil influences, adopted a contrary extreme, and, by a system of constant reserve and severity, became an object of as much terror to his children as he was to his wife. But he did not pursue this conduct without pain, and never did he visit Oakwood without bitter regret that his home was not the same. Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton had often tried to alter the aspect of affairs at Moorlands; the former, by entreating Grahame to be less severe; the latter, by urging Lady Helen to a firmer mode of conduct. But those friendly efforts were as yet entirely useless. Grahame became a member of Parliament, which took his family to London for five or six months in the year--a particularly agreeable change to Lady Helen, who then associated with her sisters, whose families were conducted much on the same fashion as her own, but unfortunately only increasing the discomfort of Moorlands when they returned to it. And this was the more to be regretted, from the fact that both Grahame and his wife were full of good intentions, and had the one been more yielding, and the other more firm, there might have been no small share of happiness for both. But heavy as Lady Helen thought her trial in the want of her husband's confidence and love, and which she had greatly brought upon herself, it was light in comparison with that of Mrs. Greville, another near neighbor and valued friend of Mrs. Hamilton. She had loved and married a man whose winning manners and appearance, and an ever-varying flow of intelligent conversation, had completely concealed, till too late, his real character. Left at a very early age his own master, with a capital estate and large fortune; educated at a very large public school, at which he learned literally nothing but vice, and how effectually to conceal it; courted and flattered wherever he went, he became vain, overbearing, and extravagant; with no pursuit but that of gambling in all its varieties, even hunting and shooting could not be thoroughly enjoyed without some large bets depending on the day's sport: his thoughts from boyhood were so completely centered in self, that he had affection for nothing else. He had indeed fancied he loved Jessie Summers, when he had so successfully wooed her; but the illusion was speedily dispelled, and repeatedly he cursed his folly for plaguing himself with a wife. His first child, too, was a girl and that annoyed him still more; and when, the next year, a boy was granted, he certainly rejoiced, but it was such rejoicing as to fill his wife's heart with an agony of dread; for he swore he would make his boy as jovial a spirit as himself, and that her namby-pamby ideas should have nothing to do with him.