Oh! to me, how much more delightful than the grander but hurrying, whirling life of busy London! How much more worth seem to me the solid satisfactions of an affluent and intellectual country life, than the pageantry and ornamental glare of a more artificial existence.” Millicent assented with passionate tears to every word of her friend’s discourse, but this did not help the real difficulty. Her heart had undergone a revolution, and the stern decision stood unabated before her. In a few more days Dr. Leroy had insisted on a candid statement of Millicent’s feelings towards him; and she had given it, though it cost her a terrible agony. She had no misgivings as to the necessity of this avowal; but the rent that must be made in many friendships, the sorrow which she knew it must bring upon her parents, and the misery which it must inflict on one who had been the friend of her earliest youth, came with a crushing weight upon her. Dr. Leroy left the house, and returned to Castleborough, but it was with the look of a man who had received an inner death-wound. Pale and silent, he seemed to casual passers as if he had suddenly become actually black. There was the dark shadow of a dreary desolation on his countenance. He made no complaint to any one, not even to his own mother; he made none to the parents of Millicent, but they saw in her pallid, compressed features, in her silent manner, and her eyes, whence she strove in vain to remove the traces of weeping, that something was going awfully wrong. It was not long before Mrs. Heritage had managed to draw the astounding secret from Millicent’s lips, on condition only that she should not write to the Barringtons about it.