For full five minutes they walked along without a word, and then Trafford, at first timidly, but by degrees more boldly, began a narrative of his visit to the Sewells' house. It is not--nor need it be--our task to follow him through a long narrative, broken, irregular, and unconnected as it was. Hampered by the difficulties which on each side beset him of disparaging those of whom he desired to say no word of blame, and of still vindicating himself from all charge of dishonor, he was often, it must be owned, entangled, and sometimes scarcely intelligible. He owned to have been led into high play against his will, and equally against his will induced to form an intimacy with Mrs. Sewell, which, beginning in a confidence, wandered away into Heaven knows what of sentimentality, and the like. Trafford talked of Lucy Lendrick and his love, and Mrs. Sewell talked of her cruel husband and her misery; and they ended by making a little stock-fund of affection, where they came in common to make their deposits and draw their cheques on fortune. All this intercourse was the more dangerous that he never knew its danger; and though, on looking back, he was astonished to think what intimate relations subsisted between them, yet, at the time, these had not seemed in the least strange to him. To her sad complaints of neglect, ill-usage, and insult, he offered such consolations as occurred to him: nor did it seem to him that there was any peril in his path, till his mother burst forth with that atrocious charge against Mrs. Sewell for having seduced her son, and which, so far from repelling with the indignation it might have evoked, she appeared rather to bend under, and actually seek his protection to shelter her. Weak and broken by his accident at the race, these difficulties almost overcame his reason; never was there, to his thinking, such a web of entanglement. The hospitality of the house he was enjoying outraged and violated by the outbreaks of his mother's temper; Sewell's confidence in him betrayed by the confessions he daily listened to from his wife; her sorrows and griefs all tending to a dependence on his counsels which gave him a partnership in her conduct. “With all these upon me,” said he, “I don't think I was actually mad, but very often I felt terribly close to it. A dozen times a day I would willingly have fought Sewell; as willingly would I have given all I ever hoped to possess in the world to enable his wife to fly his tyranny, and live apart from him. I so far resented my mother's outrageous conduct, that I left her without a good-bye.” I can no more trace him through this wandering explanation than I dare ask my reader to follow. It was wild, broken, and discursive. Now interrupted by protestations of innocence, now dashed by acknowledgments of sorrow, who knows if his unartistic story did not serve him better than a more connected narrative,--there was such palpable truth in it!