A word of Miss Blake. That the perfidy--she looked upon it as such--of Lieutenant Andinnian in regard to herself, was a very bitter blow and tried her heart nearly as the separation was trying Lucy's, may at once be admitted. Nothing, in the world or out of it, would have persuaded her that the young man did not at an early period love her, that he would have ultimately married her but for the stepping in between them of Lucy Cleeve: and there lay a very angry and bitter feeling against Lucy at the bottom of her heart. Not against Mr. Andinnian. The first shock over, she quite exonerated him, and threw all the weight of blame on Lucy. Is it not ever so--that woman, in a case of rivalry such as this, detests and misjudges the woman, and exempts the man? But Miss Blake had a very strict conscience. In one of more gentle and tender nature, this would have been an admirable thing; in her, whose nature was exceptionally hard, it might cause her to grow into something undesirably stern. There was a chance for her yet. Underlying her every thought, word, action, her witty sallies in the ball-room, her prayers in church, remained ever the one faint hope--that Karl Andinnian would recover his senses and return to his first allegiance. If this ever came to pass, and she became Mrs. Andinnian, the little kindness existing in Theresa Blake's nature would assert itself. For, though she was very just, or strove to be, she was not kind. With this strict conscience, Miss Blake could not encourage her ill-feeling towards Lucy. On the contrary, she put it resolutely from her, and strove to go on her way in a duteous course of life and take up her own sorrow as a kind of appointed cross. All very well, this, so far as it went: but there was one dreadful want ever making itself heard--the want to fill the aching void in her lonely heart. After a disappointment to the affections, all women feel this need; and none unless they have felt it, can know or imagine the intense need of it. When the heart has been filled to the uttermost with a beloved object, every hour of the day gladdened with his sight, every dream of the night rejoicing with the thought of the morning's renewed meeting, and he is compulsorily snatched away for ever, the awful blank left is almost worse than death. Every aim and end and hope in life seems to have died suddenly out, leaving only a vacuum: a vacuum that tells of nothing but pain. But for finding some object which the mind can take up and concentrate itself upon, there are women who could go mad. Miss Blake found hers in religion.