Eleanor Hill should of course have left the house of her guardian, that had proved such a valley of poison to her girlhood, the very moment when she made that discovery of her final and complete betrayal. But then, strictly speaking, she should have left it long before; and the same compliant spirit that had once yielded, could yield again. Pity her who will--blame her who may--she bowed beneath the weight of her own helplessness and remained, instead of fleeing from the spot that very night and shaking off the dust of her feet against it, even if she begged her bread thereafter from door to door. Not with what she should have done, and not with what some others whom we have known would have done under the circumstances, have we to do. She remained. Not the same as she had been before--Dr. Philip Pomeroy knew and felt the difference; and yet submissive and apparently unrepining. Not the same in cheerfulness, as Miss Hester felt and deplored: she spoke less, seldomer went out, even when strongly tempted, and spent much more time in the solitude and silence of her own room. It is not for us to put upon record precisely what passed between the guardian and his ward in the months that immediately followed that revelation; as unfortunately at that point information otherwise complete and uninterrupted, is defective for a considerable interval. It is beyond doubt that in the breast of Eleanor Hill fear and hatred had taken the place of love towards the man whom she had once idolized--that the sense of shame weighing upon her had become every day heavier and less endurable--and that she would have fled away at any moment, but from the fact that she was utterly helpless, pecuniarily and in any capacity for earning her own subsistence, and that she believed in the probability of Dr. Philip Pomeroy putting in force the cruel threat he had made, and publishing her shame to the world, distorted to suit his own purposes, the moment she should have quitted his abode and his guardianly "protection!"