But while Morton was thus laboring on, Edith Leslie was passing through an ordeal incomparably more severe. Month after month dragged on, and her father still lingered, sinking again and again to the very edge of the grave, and then rallying, as if with a fresh life. Vinal, meanwhile, was in a good measure recovered from the effects of his accident. His home and hers, if it could be called a home, was now a house in town, which her father had fitted up for her in view of her marriage. She had a painful and delicate part to act--at her father's bedside, to appear as the happy and contented wife; at home, to endure the presence of the man whose treachery filled her with horror, and whose love for her, though she had never spoken a word of reproof, had changed into fear and hatred. Of his actual presence, however, she had to endure little; for he shunned her studiously; and her house was to her a solitude, where she passed hours of a suffering more intense than Morton had ever known in the dungeons of Ehrenberg. Meanwhile, the servants, those domestic spies, did not fail to rumor abroad the singular mode of life of the bride and bridegroom; that Vinal avoided the house; that they seldom met, even at meals; and that no word or look of sympathy or confidence seemed ever to pass between them. Such rumors found their currency among the busier gossips of the town; but Morton, secluded among his books, remained wholly ignorant of them. CHAPTER LXII. Old friends, like old swords, still are trusted best.--_Webster_. It was nearly a year since he had landed at New York, and Morton still remained a literary hermit. Society was stale and distasteful to him. He passed three fourths of his day in his library, and the rest on horseback. At length, however, it happened that a cousin of his mother, one of his few relatives in the city, was to give a ball on occasion of her daughter's _debut_; and lest his refusal should be thought unkind, Morton promised to come. He drove to town in the afternoon; and walking through a somewhat obscure street, suddenly, on turning a corner, saw, some four or five rods before him, a well-remembered face. It was the face of Henry Speyer. The discovery was mutual. Speyer instantly turned down a by-lane. Morton quickened his pace, and reached the head of the lane in time to see the broad shoulders of the patriot in full retreat. He soon lost sight of him among a wilderness of back yards and squalid houses. The incident greatly disturbed and exasperated him. "A broken oath is nothing to him," he thought to himself; "he is at Vinal again, dragging at his veins like a vampire."