Elizabeth and Mrs. Heritage assisted her up-stairs. The servants, as they passed through the hall, stood aghast and in tears. When Elizabeth had seen Millicent in bed, and again promised to return early in the morning, she embraced her affectionately, and, kissing Mrs. Heritage, hastened down-stairs and away home. There she found the departure of Dr. Leroy the absorbing subject. Her father commented very severely on Miss Heritage for jilting him, as he bluntly called it, for a richer man in London. That was his plain version of the story. That she found was the universal opinion amongst their mutual acquaintance. The true cause of Dr. Leroy’s departure, her mother said, had oozed out to the public, which was greatly excited by this sudden abandonment of his practice by a young man so greatly honoured and esteemed. The blame of Miss Heritage was universal and intense. “She so wealthy,” they said, “to let wealth and worldly distinction obliterate the feelings and the friendship of years.” The shadows that Mrs. Heritage had foreseen in the hayfield, had thus fallen on her own house and heart in an Egyptian density, wherever else they might yet extend themselves. No hayfield fête had been held since that memorable day; and causes more closely touching the Woodburns than the darkness lying upon Fair Manor seemed to herald a long cessation of such halcyon times. CHAPTER VII. THORSBY’S FALL AND CONVERSION. The early married days of Letty Woodburn seemed perfect in their felicity. Often she used to drive over in the handsome open carriage which Thorsby kept chiefly for her use, and whenever she came it was with all the flush of happy life and gaiety about her. She seemed to like her town life, and the new circle of friends that her marriage had introduced her to, yet she always appeared to inhale a fresh draught of joy as she sat in the old rooms, rambled round the old garden, and saw the accustomed objects and people about her as formerly. “Oh!” she would say, “how charming are these dear old scenes—how glad am I that I can so readily come back to them!” She and Thorsby generally spent their Sundays there, and he was ever in the best of spirits, and even Betty Trapps had somewhat relented towards him—It was observed that he scarcely ever had a jibe at Methodists, evidently out of care not to hurt Betty’s feelings, though, as he expressed it, he often trod on her corns by laughing at her friends, Sylvanus Crook and David Qualm. He had bought somewhere, and brought one day, a highly coloured engraving, all bright blue, red, and yellow, of Shon-ap-Morgan-ap-Shenkin-ap-Gwillim, a shentleman of Wales—as the inscription under it expressed it—going to take possession of his father’s estate, riding on a goat. This he said he was going to present to Howell Crusoe, the village schoolmaster, as a pleasing memento of his native country. All the Woodburn family begged of him not to do it, saying it would hurt