The failure of Augusta’s banishment to Carr should have taught her that romance is nursed in solitude, and that conciliation is better than coercion. Had she spared a few hours from the warehouse to arrange a dance, or a gipsy-party to Dunham Park; chaperoned her lovely daughter to assembly, theatre, or concert-room; invited her companionship in a stroll through St. Ann’s Square and King Street, calling at Mrs. Edge’s fashionably-frequented library by the way; joined the after-morning-church promenaders in the Infirmary Gardens, or given a little time to morning calls, she would have brought Augusta into contact with young people of her own age, and with the attractive of the opposite sex, and so have supplied an antidote for the poison Laurence and ultra-sentimental literature had instilled. Instead, never was the golden fruit of the Hesperides more vigilantly guarded. She was kept much within doors. The modern notion that a daily airing is indispensable had not been promulgated, or had not become the creed of the manufacturing community. Mrs. Ashton had “no leisure for gadding,” and Augusta cared little to drive in the gig with only James for her charioteer, or even to walk with Ellen, so long as the mulberry-coloured livery was in attendance. (It might have been otherwise, had not the said James held it as much “beneath his dignity” to accept a bribe as he had formerly done to wait upon Mr. Clegg.) From her old bed-room, which overlooked Mosley Street, she was relegated to one in the rear, which commanded no wider prospect than their own courtyard, nor anything more interesting than Nelson and his kennel—by-the-bye, Nelson had been in favour since the sad accident on the ice. Then, visits to Marsden Square were prohibited, lest she should there meet John Walmsley’s undesirable friend; and altogether her escapade had converted home into a cage, in spite of its gilding. As might have been expected, the high-spirited, wayward girl, so long her father’s pet, so long indulged in her caprices, chafed and rebelled against every fresh token of restraint, and contrasted the dull monotony of her life with the freedom and gaiety promised so frequently by Laurence as the certain concomitants of wifehood with him. With all her haughty spirit, she had a clinging, affectionate nature, tinged though it was with poetry and romance; and now that her father looked so unusually grave, and her mother so frigid, and she felt herself an alien from both their hearts, instead of bewailing her premeditated flight as a crime, the tendrils of her love only clung closer to him who professed so much, and the more she was isolated from them, the more she brooded on the ill-used and maligned Laurence, his manly beauty and accomplishments, his lavish generosity, his fascinations of voice and manner, and the fervour of his passion for her.