Lord Albert was looking pale and harassed, but he was perfectly calm, and inquired, with that steady voice which a sense of deep injury conveys at the moment, after Lady Adeline's health, while he expressed his concern at the indisposition under which she seemed to have suffered so much the preceding evening. Her reply was short (for she did not dare to trust herself with any allusion to the cause of her illness), and she thanked him in as natural a manner as she could assume; but her lip was blanched and quivered, and a tear was almost glistening in her eye. To any one who knew what was really passing in her heart, she would have appeared to have been saying to herself, "Is it possible this is Albert? my Albert?" But turning the conversation to some indifferent subject, she addressed herself with a semblance of vivacity to Mr. Foley; that false vivacity to which the suffering heart, when taking refuge from the moment's pressure, resorts, in order to conceal its true feelings. Unfortunately Lord Albert was himself too much blinded by his own at the time, to see through the specious disguise she assumed; and with the perversity of jealous love, he put a false construction on her every word and whole demeanour, and thought he beheld in both the full confirmation of his suspicions. Under this false view, Lord Albert turned with visible indignation away, as if to avoid the pain which Lady Adeline's behaviour inspired; and he seemed to be intently admiring the pictures which hung on the walls, and which he knew by heart: but as his eye wandered over them, in fact, unconsciously, it rested on a portrait of himself,--the same which, when awaiting Lady Adeline's arrival in London with such lively impatience, he had then missed from its usual station. How a trifling circumstance has power to double pain or pleasure, when it comes thus laden with past and present allusion to the interests of the heart! The idea at that time of its being her companion was joy to his spirit. With what very different feelings did he regard it _now_! The whole of his late hopes seemed to him a mockery, and his heart sickened at the thought as he again turned from the contemplation and threw himself into a chair.