The effect of this calamity, on the mind of Mrs Ashley, was such as to produce strong apprehensions of the most dangerous consequences. No consolation could be administered to her with the slightest chance of abating a grief which had sunk too deep for human aid to relieve. After some months, it was discovered that a hereditary tendency to consumption had received a fatal increase of strength, from the decayed state of her constitution; and the disease having progressed with that rapidity so often observed to be one of its most appalling symptoms, the bereaved mother breathed her last in the arms of the fate-stricken and inconsolable husband. It was on a rainy day, in December, that the remains of Mrs Ashley were to be conveyed to her father’s vault, a few miles distant from “The Castle;” a large cavalcade of mourners attended; the funeral was conducted with a state and pomposity suited to the rank of the deceased; the procession glided silently along, by a road passing through the dark forests of “The Castle,” and by that spot where the unhappy victim of Ashley’s perfidy resigned her honour and her peace for ever. The trysting-tree was still there, with its branches bending under a load of December snows, which the thaw had not yet been able to dissolve. There Mary Lee took her station; and, as the mournful procession passed, the woods resounded with the same wild laugh that had met the ear of Ashley, on the disappearance of his son. Years rolled on, but the bereaved husband and father finds little assuasive power in the effects of time. Robert Ashley experienced this melancholy truth, and sought assistance from a fountain, the perennial consolations of which flow over the hearts of the rich and the poor. The extraordinary manner in which the early victim of his heartless seduction had triumphed over his misfortunes, appeared to him as the supernatural effect of Divine retribution. The idea haunted him like the invertible companions of Orestes. A deep melancholy took possession of his spirits, and made its usual inroads upon a constitution which early vices and unprecedented bereavements had made susceptible of the despoiling ravages of disease. His mind became occupied with a presentiment that the death of every member of his family would alone atone for the ruin he had brought on that individual, whose fate seemed to have constituted her an avenger of wrongs, only to be expiated by the greatest of misfortunes, visited on the head of him who had blasted the prospects of one of God’s creatures, and expelled his victim from the sanctuary of grace.