"It appears to me," thought Mrs. Bloxam, "that I shall get out of this business safely whatever happens, if she only perseveres in hiding her marriage; and I don't think there's much danger of her not doing so." "I am rather tired, dear," said Gertrude after a pause, during which they had both kept silence, and turning towards Mrs. Bloxam with perhaps the sweetest smile and the friendliest gesture she had ever bestowed upon that lady; "and I think we will not talk any more just now. Tell Lady Belwether I shall try to come down for a little this evening. I am far from suspecting the kind old lady of wishing me to tumble for the company; but I should like to oblige her and the Dean, if possible." Mrs. Bloxam took the hint. Gertrude was left alone, to endure all the agony caused her by the resolution she had taken; but yet to feel that she derived strength from having taken it, and that to get her decision finally and authoritatively communicated to Miles Challoner by Lord Sandilands, with the addition of an earnest request that he would not remain in England at present, and subject her and himself to the pain of meeting, was a very sensible relief. The bitterness of the suffering through which she passed at this time never quite died out of Gertrude's memory. There was something in it which wrung her soul with a far keener and deadlier anguish than all the coarser, more actual miseries which had beset her miserable married life. By the measure of the increased strength and refinement of her feelings, of the growth of her intellect, and the development of her tastes, the power and the obligation to suffer in this instance were increased. Of the man whom she had once fancied she loved, Gertrude never thought with any distinctness either of abhorrence, fear, or regret. The few words she had spoken to him in the midst of the fashionable crowd where they had last met had, she felt, effectually freed her from his pursuit henceforth; and in her present frame of mind, with her whole nature softened by her love for Miles, she was accustomed to look back rather on her own errors of judgment and perception as the fatal folly of her own girlhood, as the origin of her misfortunes, and to allow the sinister figure of her husband to slink in the backgrounds of her memory, something to be shunned and left in obscurity. In the wildest and deepest of her misery, and when her resolution was highest and sternest, there was one steadfast feeling in Gertrude's heart, by which she clung in all the tempest of emotion, while the clamour was loudest in her storm-tossed heart. It was the indestructible happiness of knowing herself beloved. Nothing could take that from her, whatever befell; life might have many more trials, many more deprivations in store for her, but it could not deprive her of that--not even change on his own part: and she did not think he would change. Very early in their acquaintance she had recognised, with the pleasure of a kindred