“How much trouble and misery has been caused by one act of selfish folly! Because Augustine—too great a genius, I suppose, to judge like a sensible man—fancies to roam through the clouds, and take with him a wilful, disobedient child, while a petulant girl eggs on her husband to follow so absurd an example, a whole family must be plunged into terror, grief, and alarm! I felt convinced from the first that all would end happily enough. Augustine has easily guided the balloon; it has floated quietly down at its leisure to some quiet meadow in Devon; and but for the poor earl’s shaken nerves, the whole affair to those most concerned has been nothing but a party of pleasure! It is we who have had to suffer for the senseless folly of others. There’s Ida has been looking like a spectre; and my dear, excellent husband is first almost crushed with sorrow, and then hurried off, at half-an-hour’s notice, to escort that half frantic countess to a husband who will probably refuse to see her! Well, well, I believe that of all senses common sense is the most uncommon!” and with a soothing conviction that a portion, at least, of the rare gift had been bestowed upon herself, Mrs. Aumerle quietly returned to her usual avocations. It was fortunate for Mabel that the morrow’s post brought to her stepmother’s hands the letter which the young girl had dropped from the balloon. Ida had left a request, that notes addressed to her might in her absence be opened by Mrs. Aumerle, and thus it was that that lady first became aware of some of the perils through which the travellers had passed. Mabel’s letter had been picked up in a field and posted by the farmer who had found it, and the touching lines of love and penitence which she had penned in the near prospect of a terrible death, softened in a very great degree the feelings of her step-mother towards her. “She has had her share of suffering after all,” observed the lady, “and we must not be severe upon the poor child. She has had punishment enough for her fault, so I’m content to ‘let bygones be bygones.’” CHAPTER XXVIII. THE WHEEL TURNS “Thus artists melt the sullen ore of lead, By heaping coals of fire upon its head.” GOLDSMITH. When the Countess of Dashleigh, with bitter words of reproach, had departed from the cottage of Bardon, she left her late entertainers in a state of mind little to be envied. The unfortunate Cecilia was for the rest of the day much in the position of one who, with hands tied, is caged up with a large hornet which has been irritated, and which goes about buzzing with evident determination to find or to make a foe. Everything went wrong with the doctor, and his daughter was the only being within reach of the hornet’s sting!