Lord Montfort, sauntering into Caroline's room, found her insensible on the floor--an open letter by her side. Summoning her maid to her assistance, he took the marital privilege of reading the letter which had apparently caused her swoon. It was from Matilda, and written in a state of maddened excitement. Matilda had little enough of what is called heart; but she had an intense selfishness, which, in point of suffering, supplies the place of a heart. It was not because she could not feel for the wrongs of another that she could not feel anguish for her own. Arabella was avenged. The cold-blooded snake that had stung her met the fang of the cobra-capella. Matilda had learned from some anonymous correspondent (probably a rival of Gabrielle's) of Jasper's liaison with that adventuress. But half recovered from her confinement, she had risen from her bed--hurried to Paris (for the pleasures of which her husband had left her)--seen this wretched Gabrielle--recognised in her the false baroness to whom Jasper had presented her--to whom, by Jasper's dictation, she had written such affectionate letters--whom she had employed to plead her cause to her father;--seen Gabrielle--seen her at her own luxurious apartment, Jasper at home there--burst into vehement wrath-roused up the cobra-capella; and on declaring she would separate from her husband, go back to her father, tell her wrongs, appeal to his mercy, Gabrielle caimly replied: "Do so, and I will take care that your father shall know that your plea for his pardon through Madame la Baronne was a scheme to blacken his name, and to frustrate his marriage. Do not think that he will suppose you did not connive at a project so sly; he must know you too well, pretty innocent." No match for Gabrielle Desmarets, Matilda flung from the house, leaving Jasper whistling an air from Figaro; returned alone to the French town from which she now wrote to Caroline, pouring out her wrongs, and, without seeming sensible that Caroline had been wronged too, expressing her fear that her father might believe her an accomplice in Jasper's plot, and refuse her the means to live apart from the wretch; upon whom she heaped every epithet that just indignation could suggest to a feeble mind. The latter part of the letter, blurred and blotted, was incoherent, almost raving. In fact Matilda was then seized by the mortal illness which hurried her to her grave. To the Marquess much of this letter was extremely uninteresting --much of it quite incomprehensible. He could not see why it should so overpoweringly affect his wife. Only those passages which denounced a scheme to frustrate some marriage meditated by Mr. Darrell made him somewhat uneasy, and appeared to him to demand an explanation. But Caroline, in the anguish to which she awakened, forestalled his inquiries. To her but two thoughts were present--how she had wronged Darrell--how ungrateful and faithless she must seem to him; and in the