Katharine's mother had brought her husband no advantages in their short, not remarkably happy, marriage, except those attached to an extensive and distinguished family connection. She had no fortune, no possessions of any kind, except some handsome jewels, which were secured to her, to descend to her children. She lived only a short time; but it is probable she thought the period sufficiently prolonged; for she died, when Katharine was born, with no further expression of regret than that she wished she could have taken the child with her; but was consoled by learning that the physicians thought the feeble infant very unlikely to live. Isabella Stanbourne--for such was the name of Katharine's mother--was a handsome woman, of fine mind and high principles. These qualities had not availed to prevent her making the tremendous though not unusual mistake of a wholly uncongenial marriage; but they did her the questionable service of opening her eyes to the blunder she had committed before she had been Edward Guyon's wife many weeks. Once opened, Mrs. Guyon's eyes were not the sort of optics ever to be even partially closed again; and they perceived and scrutinised every particular of her husband's character and conduct with merciless clearness and vigilance. That gentleman furnished them with ample material for their scrutiny; and from the close of the honeymoon to the termination of her life Mrs. Guyon held the partner of her existence, whom she knew to be a liar and a profligate, and suspected to be a swindler, in quiet, undemonstrative, but supreme contempt. She was a woman in whom the existence of any kind of regard or even compassion was incompatible with the least feeling of scorn; and so she never tried to persuade herself that she entertained either towards her husband, from the day she found out that the man she had married was a being of a totally different order to the idol which her fancy had set up and worshipped. She did not leave him, even when she made further and more serious discoveries: in the first place, because she disliked the scandal of a separation; in the second, because she was conscious of great delicacy of health, and had a strong presentiment that she should not survive the birth of her child. She determined to give herself the chance, if, contrary to her conviction, she lived; she could then decide upon her future. The chance befriended her, and Mrs. Guyon died. Her last days were undisturbed by her husband's presence. He had gone to Doncaster when the event which made him a father and a widower took place; and having made rather a good thing of the expedition, he returned to town in very tolerable spirits, and felt that he should now be more interesting and irresistible than ever as a young widower, and could easily get over the inconsolable stage by a trip on the Continent. His dead wife's sister-in-law, the Hon. Mrs. Philip Stanbourne, undertook very gladly