How important in life may be a single second, when on its little point hangs a momentous decision! The countess almost pronounced the word “yes!” but with the rapidity of lightning, Pride poured his suggestions into her ear. Not only would the revocation of the order given appear weak indecision to the maid, but Mabel would naturally carry back the letters, while Bates proceeded to the post with Ida’s, and she could hardly avoid seeing their addresses. She would then easily guess the cause of their writer’s vacillation and change of purpose; she would conclude that her cousin had penned that which she was afraid or ashamed to send. These ideas took much less time in rushing through the brain of Annabella, than they have done in passing before the eye of the reader, and they silenced the assent which trembled on the lip of the irresolute countess. “Shall I call back Bates?” asked Mabel again. “No,” answered Annabella from above; and retiring from the window the miserable girl threw herself on a chair, and exclaiming, “It is too late now,—too late! the irrevocable step is taken!” she covered her face with her hands, as if by so doing she could shut out reflection. Yet, strange to say, she yet clung to the shadow of a hope that Bates might find the post-office closed, and bring back to her the fatal letters! CHAPTER XV. THE DESERTED HOME. “Thine honour is my life, both grow in one, Take honour from me and my life is done!” SHAKSPEARE. The Earl of Dashleigh had suffered more acutely from the departure of his wife, than Annabella or the world believed. He missed her presence in his home more painfully than even to himself he would own. The nobleman was, as I have said, not of a hard disposition, and by nature was of a sociable temperament. Pride had indeed drawn around him an icy barrier which greatly shut him out from friendly intercourse with his neighbours, but this very isolation made him the more dependent upon the few with whom he could stoop to associate. Dashleigh had scarcely been aware of how much pleasure he had derived from his wife’s wit and lively conversation, till he found himself suddenly thrown on his own resources which were limited, and his own reflections which were unpleasant. He wandered listlessly through his long suite of apartments; their splendid decorations made them but appear to their owner more empty, desolate, and dull. Yet Dashleigh dared not quit them for more cheerful scenes, for he felt, with the instinctive shrinking of a shy, proud, sensitive man, that his domestic concerns were now the theme of a thousand tongues and that he could appear in no place where he would not be an object of observation and remark. Solitude was hateful to the peer, but society would have been yet more distasteful.