Our readers may readily imagine that though blessed with every outward advantage of person and position, our heroine felt more alone even than when cloistered within the walls of Warrenne Vicarage. Then at least she might hope for a brighter future; now to hope were a crime, for would it not involve the death of another, and that other a husband. The marriage tie, in its spiritual and inner sense, is, indeed, as we are taught to believe, an inheritance from Paradise; it supposes the perfect union of the sexes, so that two separate existences become virtually one individual. Neither would be complete without the other. Force blends with weakness; firmness with gentleness; and mutual love and confidence is the crowning bliss of all.—But observe the reverse of the picture, alas! far more common than the other side. The hourly clash of angry tempers and selfish desires, brutality and neglect on the part of the husband, met by reproaches from the wife, and yet with all this, and perhaps the vice of intoxication in addition, the wretched pair must drag out a miserable existence till “death do them part.” Happy those countries where divorce is permitted for other, though not slighter causes than infidelity! I mentioned that Evelyn, as a girl, was scarcely aware either of her beauty or of her extreme power of fascination. Now that she had become a married child, older women spoiled her, telling her she had thrown herself away, and that with advantages of person and fortune such as hers, she might have aspired to become a duchess, or, as Evelyn added with a sigh, “I might, had I waited, have met with one worthy of my love, and have become a happy, instead of an unloving and therefore wretched wife.” Often have I contrasted Rookwood—beloved home of the intelligent, the refined, the sympathetic—with the scarcely less beautiful Woodlands, the abode of uncongenial spirits.