Lady Jane had been for two months the solitary inhabitant of those two rooms on the second floor. Yet not altogether solitary--Nurse Mordaunt had been allowed to join her, and had been the faithful companion of her captivity. She was a better companion than a younger maid would have been, for she had been a kind of second mother to Lady Jane, and knew all her life and everything that concerned her, besides being a person of great and varied experience, who had anecdotes and tales to illustrate every vicissitude of life. Nurse Mordaunt was acquainted even with parallel instances to place beside Lady Jane’s own position. She knew every kind of thing that had ever happened “in families,” by which familiar expression she meant great families like those to which she had been accustomed all her life. Little families without histories she knew nothing of. The profound astonishment which overwhelmed Lady Jane when she found herself a prisoner it would be impossible to describe. She felt once more as she had felt when her father insulted her womanly delicacy and sent the blood of shame tingling to her cheeks, shame not so much for herself as for him. Was it possible that her father, the head of so great a house, the descendant of so many noble ancestors, and again her father, the man to whom she had looked up with undoubting confidence and admiration all her life--that at the end he was no true gentleman at all, but only a sham gentleman, the shadow without any substance, the symbol, with all meaning gone out of it? Do not suppose that Lady Jane put this deliberately into words. Ah, no! the thoughts we put into words do not sting us like those that glance into our souls like an arrow, darting, wounding before we have time to put up any shield or defence to keep them out. Deeper even than her separation at such a moment from her lover, more bitter than her thoughts of his disappointment, of his rage and misery, was this empoisoned thought: her father, a great peer, a noble gentleman--yet thus suddenly showing himself not noble at all, not true, a tyrant, without any understanding even of the creatures whom he could oppress. Lady Jane was sad enough on her own account and on Winton’s, it may well be believed: but of this last wound she felt that she never could be healed. Imagine those traditions of her rank in which she had been brought up, her proud yet so earnest and humble sense of its obligations, the martyrdom which in her youth she had been so ready to accept--all come down to this, that she was a prisoner in her father’s house, locked up like a naughty child,--she who had been trained to be the princess royal, the representative of an ideal race! Ah, if it had but been a revolution, a rebellion, democracy rampant, such an imprisonment as she had once been taught to think likely! but to sink down from the grandeur of that conception to the pettiness and bathos of this! She tried to smile to