She put her hand to her head, as if partly conscious of the confusion of her own ideas: and ashamed that Belinda should witness it, she desired Marriott to assist her to rise, and to support her to her bedchamber. She made a sign to Miss Portman not to follow her. “Do not take it unkindly, but I am quite exhausted, and wish to be alone; for I am grown fond of being alone some hours in the day, and perhaps I shall sleep.” Marriott came out of her lady’s room about a quarter of an hour afterward, and said that her lady seemed disposed to sleep, but that she desired to have her hook left by her bedside. Marriott searched among several which lay upon the table, for one in which a mark was put. Belinda looked over them along with Marriott, and she was surprised to find that they had almost all methodistical titles. Lady Delacour’s mark was in the middle of Wesley’s Admonitions. Several pages in other books of the same description Miss Portman found marked in pencil, with reiterated lines, which she knew to be her ladyship’s customary mode of distinguishing passages that she particularly liked. Some were highly oratorical, but most of them were of a mystical cast, and appeared to Belinda scarcely intelligible. She had reason to be astonished at meeting with such books in the dressing-room of a woman of Lady Delacour’s character. During the solitude of her illness, her ladyship had first begun to think seriously on religious subjects, and the early impressions that had been made on her mind in her childhood, by a methodistical mother, recurred. Her understanding, weakened perhaps by disease, and never accustomed to reason, was incapable of distinguishing between truth and error; and her temper, naturally enthusiastic, hurried her from one extreme to the other--from thoughtless scepticism to visionary credulity. Her devotion was by no means steady or permanent; it came on by fits usually at the time when the effect of opium was exhausted, or before a fresh dose began to operate. In these intervals she was low-spirited--bitter reflections on the manner in which she had thrown away her talents and her life obtruded themselves; the idea of the untimely death of Colonel Lawless, of which she reproached herself as the cause, returned; and her mind, from being a prey to remorse, began to sink in these desponding moments under the most dreadful superstitious terrors--terrors the more powerful as they were secret. Whilst the stimulus of laudanum lasted, the train of her ideas always changed, and she was amazed at the weak fears and strange notions by which she had been disturbed; yet it was not in her power entirely to chase away these visions of the night, and they gained gradually a dominion over her, of which she was heartily ashamed. She resolved to conceal this _weakness_, as in her gayer moments she thought it, from Belinda, from whose superior strength of understanding she dreaded ridicule or contempt. Her experience of Miss Portman’s gentleness