Lord Sotheron returned to his home, humbled also, but soured and embittered. He was angry with himself for having condescended to solicit, indignant with ministers for having refused, and estranged from Maria, whom he looked upon as the clog which must ever prevent his rising in the career for which he felt himself formed. Hitherto, although neglectful, he had never been unkind; indeed, on any occasion of illness or distress, he had been attentive and devoted; she had flattered herself that, although often dormant, his affection for her was still all there. But ambition, like the love of gambling, when once it possesses the mind, gradually swallows up all other feelings, and he was now captious, sullen, he spoke sharply to her, seemed bored with what she said, and occasionally implied that she could know nothing of what was going on in the world. She suffered in silence. This was not a case in which open communication would be of any avail. When did a discussion ever call back to life extinct affection? Affection once extinct, what material had she to work upon? There were moments when she thought it hard _he_ should be the person, in manner, if not in words, to reproach her for her error. At least that error was mutual, and she remembered the arguments, the entreaties, the vows, the oaths he had employed to lead her to the very step for which he now despised her. But oftener, far oftener, she found excuses for him in that heart where he was so dearly cherished; she reflected how galling it must be to a proud and eager temper to have sued in vain; she looked back with tenderness and gratitude to the many proofs of affection he had given her in former times, and she pitied rather than resented his present irritation. Mrs. Fitz-Eustace remarked with sorrow the altered temper of her son, but her health, which had been of late declining, had in some measure communicated its languor to her mind. She was gradually fading away, but so gradually, that it was not till she was very near her end, that her son began to take alarm. Extreme in every thing, he was angry with her for not having warned him of the state of her health. He reproached her for having allowed her sickness to creep on without calling their attention to the alarming symptoms of which she was herself aware. She gently smiled, and told him death had no terrors for one, for whom life had no charms. “If I had seen you happy—” she added, “but as it is, I look forward almost with impatience to the moment of re-union with him from whom my heart has never for one moment been severed.” As Walter and Maria knelt by their mother’s death-bed, as she blessed them both with her faint sweet voice, their hearts once more opened to each other, and they mingled tears of sorrow which to Maria were not wholly devoid of sweetness.