Gusty mused. Could he, he thought, enlighten his mother as to the _real_ state of affairs? After some minutes’ reflection, he determined to keep the secret of the elopement, veiled as it was by the foreign mission; both because, though his suspicions came as near truth as suspicions _could_ come, yet they were not fully proved—_he_ might feel very sure himself, yet he might not he able to assure another mind—and because he did not wish to inflict upon his mother another sorrow, in addition to the one she was now almost sinking under. He felt sure that she would never receive a hint from Hagar, whom self-esteem, as well as her continued and inevitable love for her husband, would keep silent upon the subject of his perfidy, and her own wrongs and sufferings. After dinner, Emily, attended by her son, rode towards Heath Hall. * * * * * When Gusty May had left the breakfast-table for his walk to Grove Cottage, Hagar took her two children up to her own chamber—to her old eyrie in the third story. This room also was unchanged—except—yes! there sat her children’s little rose-wood crib, with all its furniture, just as it was before it had been sold at the third execution. There could be but _one_ to whom she was indebted for this delicate attention, and though her morbid pride was at first startled, yet her affections were touched by this instance of disinterested friendship. Without any pretensions, Gusty was doing everything to sanctify the uses of adversity to the heart of Hagar. It was impossible not to be softened by the kind offices of a friendship that gave everything without hope or even thought of return. This was Hagar’s first, her _very_ first experience of disinterested affection—the love of Raymond was intensely selfish, craving only the possession of its object, regardless of her affections or her happiness—and Hagar had felt that bitterly through all her married life, and most bitterly in her desertion. The effect of this selfish and cruel abandonment on the character of Hagar’s mind and heart, must have been most deleterious, fatal, but that the antidote was provided in a new phase of human sympathy revealed to her in the disinterested affection of one—an alien by blood—a rejected and humbled lover of her girlhood, a sufferer by the same treachery that laid her own hopes in the dust; one who, without pretending to any fine feelings, or expressing any fine sentiments, had quietly suppressed and concealed his own griefs, in ministering to her wants, in trying to alleviate her sorrows. Hagar’s maternity had first inspired her deepest prayer—her children had been the angels sent to conduct her heart to God—to whom, ever since, with an almost hearing, seeing, touching faith, she had offered all her joys, gratitudes, and praises, and where, alas! she had also impiously carried all her fears, complaints, and reproaches. But now she must ask a boon of Providence, that He would bless and prosper