"Then, my dear, there is but one thing to be done: Lady Lodore will assuredly force herself upon us, meet us at every turn, oblige you to pay her your duty; nor could you avoid it. No, my dear Ethel, there is but one escape--your health, thank God, is restored, and Longfield is now in all its beauty; we will return to-morrow." Ethel did not reply; she looked very disconsolate--she did not know what to say; at last, "Mr. Villiers will think it so odd," dropped from her lips. "Mr. Villiers is nothing to us, my dear," said aunt Bessy--"not the most distant relation; he is an agreeable, good-hearted young gentleman--but there are so many in the world." Ethel left her breakfast untasted and went out of the room: she felt that she could no longer restrain her tears. "My father!" she exclaimed, while a passionate burst of weeping choked her utterance, "my only friend! why, why did you leave me? Why, most cruel, desert your poor orphan child? Gracious God! to what am I reserved! I must not see my mother--a name so dear, so sweet, is for me a curse and a misery! O my father, why did you desert me!" Her calm reflections were not less bitter; she did not suffer her thoughts to wander to Villiers, or rather the loss of her father was still so much the first grief of her heart, that on any new sorrow, it was to this she recurred with agony. The form of her youthful mother also flitted before her; and she asked herself, "Can she be so wicked?" Lord Lodore had never uttered her name; it was not until his death had put the fatal seal on all things, that she heard a garbled exaggerated statement from her aunt, over whose benevolent features a kind of sacred horror mantled, whenever she was mentioned. The will of Lord Lodore, and the stern injunction it contained, that the mother and daughter should never meet, satisfied Ethel of the truth of all that her aunt said; so that educated to obedience and deep reverence for the only parent she had ever known, she recoiled with terror from transgressing his commands, and holding communication with the cause of all his ills. Still it was hard, and very, very sad; nor did she cease from lamenting her fate, till Villiers's horse was heard in the street, and his knock at the door; then she tried to compose herself. "He will surely come to us at Longfield," she thought; "Longfield will be so very stupid after London." After London! Poor Ethel! she had lived in London as in a desert; but lately it had appeared to her a city of bliss, and all places else the abode of gloom and melancholy. Villiers was shocked at the appearance of sorrow which shadowed her face; and, for a moment, thought that the rencounter with her mother was the sole occasion of the tears, whose traces he plainly discerned. His address was full of sympathetic kindness;--but when she said, "We return to-morrow to Essex--will you come to see us at Longfield?"--his soothing tones were exchanged for those of surprise and vexation.