In those hours of unchecked talk, she learned many things she had not known before--the love of Horatio Saville for Lady Lodore was revealed to her; but the story was not truly told, for the prejudices as well as the ignorance of Villiers rendered him blind to the sincerity of Cornelia's affection and regret. Ethel wondered, and in spite of the charm with which she delighted to invest the image of her mother, she could not help agreeing with her husband that she must be irrevocably wedded to the most despicable worldly feelings, so to have played with the heart of a man such as Horatio: a man, whose simplest word bore the stamp of truth and genius; one of those elected few whom nature elevats to her own high list of nobility and greatness. How could she, a simple girl, interest feelings which were not alive to Saville's merits? She could only hope that in some dazzling marriage Lady Lodore would find a compensation for the higher destiny which might have been hers, but that, like the "base Indian," she had thrown "A pearl away, Richer than all his tribe." There was a peaceful quiet in their secluded and obscure life, which somewhat resembled the hours spent on board ship, when you long for, yet fear, the conclusion of the voyage, and shrink involuntarily from exchanging a state, whose chief blessing is an absence of every care, for the variety of pains and pleasures which chequer life. Ethel possessed her all--so near, so undivided, so entirely her own, that she could not enter into Villiers's impatience, nor quite sympathize with the disquietude he could not repress. After considerable delays, his solicitor informed him that his father had so entirely disposed of all his interest in the property, that his readiness to join in any act of sale would be useless. The next thing to be done was for Edward to sell a part of his expectations, and the lawyer promised to find a purchaser, and begged to see him three days hence, when no doubt he should have some proposal to communicate. Whoever has known what such things are--whoever has waited on the demurs and objections, and suffered the alternations of total failure and suddenly renewed hopes, which are the Tantalus-food held to the lips of those under the circumstances of Villiers, can follow in imagination his various conferences with his solicitor, as day after day something new was discovered, still to drag on, or to impede, the tortoise pace of his negociations. It will be no matter of wonder to such, that a month instead of three days wasted away, and found him precisely in the same position, with hopes a little raised, though so frequently blasted, and nothing done.