Summer was once more shining and breathing its perfumes over the country round Woodburn. The pleasant fields stood full of flower-embroidered grass; of green corn waving and billowing in the scented breeze. The trees shed their verdurous gloom beneath them; the red wild rose, and the snowy discs of the elder flowers, mingled their odours with the yellow-and-red honeysuckle blossoms in the fresh hawthorn hedges. The larks carolled high in the blue air; brooks ran glittering down to the river, and the river glided on in stately beauty. All was beautiful and happy in nature as ever, but over the Grange lay a stillness, within was a stillness. Betty Trapps, pursuing her accustomed household duties, neither sung that “very cutting” song—“Once I freedah engyed,” nor the equally favourite hymn—“We are marching through Emmanuel’s land.” Mr. Woodburn wore a grave and sad air; Mrs. Woodburn sat knitting in deep thought, or watched her cheese-making, without any of her former jollity. Ann was with Letty in Castleborough, and George was taking his solitary rides over the farm, as if something lay on his heart which had banished that cheerful countenance so natural to him. There were no preparations for any festive gathering in the hayfield. “The light of other days” had disappeared like a dream. The conduct of Thorsby had verified all the instinctive prescience in Betty Trapps’s nature. Letty, the loved and loving creature of gladness, the sunshine of that once happy home; the flitting shape, the ringing, singing voice of joy in it, was a deserted wife, and the once jocose and sportive Thorsby, a disgraced and shameless fugitive. Nor was that all; those shadows which Mrs. Heritage had foreseen in the hayfield fête, had not only fallen on Woodburn Grange, but on other spots around. Fair Manor itself had not escaped. There was the only child there, then the hope and happiness of her house, now a serious and nervous woman, who had passed through a severe baptism, and now shrunk from intercourse beyond her own family walls. Awaking from the impassioned dreams of her London visit, she found that she had wounded another too deeply to leave peace in her own bosom. She had candidly stated to Edmund Barrington, that great as was her affection for him, she never could be happy in the consciousness of the affliction she had occasioned to a most worthy, faithful, and noble heart, nor under the sense of the deep blame, which all those most dear to her, or most connected with the attachments and the memories of her youth, awarded her. She had resolved, therefore, to do the only penance which should mark her sense of her wrong, and satisfy her innermost feeling of sacred duty—never to marry; but to devote herself as soon as her health should be restored, if indeed her shattered nerves should ever again regain their healthy tone, to the works of the good Samaritan.