“Then you feel quite certain--as certain as you can be of anything--that this little girl knows nothing, guesses nothing, about her birth? You see I am obliged, a little for my own sake, though of course I should be careful for _hers_, to be particular. Perhaps you may not have heard--we poor devils, you see, in the colonies may marry and be divorced, may die and rise again, without anyone at home knowing anything about it; so very likely you may not have heard the astounding fact that I have taken,” and he laughed rather foolishly, “to myself a wife?” Mrs. Bainbridge was obliged to plead guilty to the amount of colonial ignorance implied by this last suggestion. She did not, however, express any surprise that the Colonel at his time of life (a “household form” of words, under which the Colonel winced) should have decided to get married. She could understand, too, that for peace, as well as decorum’s sake, that gentleman’s pro-nuptial peccadilloes had better remain in the background. No exposure, no punishment inflicted on the destroyer of her sister’s reputation, no mortification incurred by the man who had first betrayed and then left her young sister to die, could bring the unhappy girl back to her lost life--no repentance, supposing, which was among the most improbable of human events, that Col. Norcott should exhibit signs of penitence, could make amends for the guilt and misery of the past. There was a time when Bridget Bainbridge, goaded by the memory of her sister’s wrongs, would have striven hard for vengeance on the head of the seducer; but many a day had passed since Winnifred Moriarty had expiated her follies with her life. For more than eighteen years all that was mortal of the pretty Irish girl--the “heather-bell of Ballingarry”--had been mouldering beneath a black and rotting cross in the overcrowded burial-place of her native parish. Warm-hearted Mrs. Bainbridge had shed some very bitter tears when she looked her last on that dreary spot, and invoked, we grieve to say, the vengeance of Him who is as mighty to punish as to save upon the head of the absent profligate; but Time, as I was about to say, had produced its normal and blessed effect of softening the angry feelings, and making the rough places in human memories smooth. It is not often, I think, except in tales of fiction, that a wrong is treasured up through years upon years, in spite of change and absence, gathering intensity from the fermentation of the added heap. In real life, the principle of letting bygones be bygones is usually found more convenient to carry out than the more Corsican one of “nursing one’s wrath to keep it warm.” That same wrath is apt to become a dangerous element to the individual in whose breast it is nurtured. There are enemies, besides, whose comparatively elevated position endows them with a certain immunity from punishment--from punishment, that is to say, at the hands of the lesser ones whom they have offended.