renewed fright from her silence. “Jane,” he said, “Jane! you don’t mean to give me up because your father has turned me away?” Lady Jane turned her head towards him, gave him a miserable smile, and pressed his hand faintly, then fell, as perhaps had never happened in her life before, into a passion of tears. He drew her into his arms, as was natural, and she wept on his shoulder, as one refusing to be comforted. It was but vaguely that Winton could even guess the entire upheaval of all her foundations, the ruin into which her earth had fallen. He thought it was the tragedy of his own love that was the cause, and that with this heart-breaking convulsion she was making up her mind to see it come to an end. This was the attitude in which the Duchess found them. She, too, was pale, her eyes bright, her nostrils dilated, as if she had been in the wars. She found her daughter in this speechless passion of weeping, with Winton’s pale countenance very despairing and tragical, yet touched with a livelier alarm, a frightened incomprehension, bending over her. He gave her a look of appeal as she came in; was it true that all was over, as he had said? The Duchess went to her child’s side and took the hand that lay on her lap and caressed it. “My darling,” she said, “this is not a moment to give in: and you are not one to fail in a great crisis, Jane. We have only a very little time to decide what we are to do before Reginald goes away.” She had not called him Reginald before, and there was a faint smile in her eyes as they met his--a smile of forgiveness and motherly kindness, though he had asked no pardon. The sound of her mother’s voice broke the spell of Lady Jane’s self-abandonment, and it went to Winton’s heart with a forlorn sense of happiness in the midst of all the misery, that even her mother exercised a constraint upon her which when alone with him she did not feel. Was it not that she was herself, and that with him nature had free course unabashed? But the scene grew brighter and more hopeful when the Duchess came into it. She was not surprised nor overthrown by what had happened. She put back the soft hair from her child’s forehead, and gave her a kiss of consolation. “My dearest,” she said, “the crisis has come which I knew would come. Reginald must go as soon as it is possible for him to go. It is for you now to say what is to be done. You are of age; you have a right to judge for yourself. When you told me first, I warned you what was before you. You have never taken the burden of your life upon you hitherto. Now the moment has come. I will not interfere. I will say nothing; neither will Reginald, if I understand him rightly. You must judge for yourself what you will do.”