Poor Mary! The miserable villain had even declared to her that she was not his wife. The curse of the cup, from which she had escaped when she fled from her home, had followed her, and stung her again. She had been a mother, but not a wife! She had been deceived by the wretch; she had not swerved a hair’s breadth from the law of purity and innocence in her heart, but her good name was blasted. She was cast down and destroyed, with no fault of her own, unless her hasty departure with the villain, when all earth seemed to conspire against her, was a fault; her reputation was ruined; the finger of scorn and contempt would point at her. IT WAS THE WAY OF THE WORLD. “Poor Mary!” groaned Eugene, as in the silence of his chamber he thought of the hard lot to which she had been reduced. It was not enough that she had been wronged and deceived, cheated of her honorable name as a wife; but to these were added poverty and neglect. The people in the house looked coldly upon her. They regarded her as a despised creature, and repudiated her with scorn and loathing. “O God! that she should come to this! She whom I loved with all my soul, whom I would have made my wife,” he moaned, as he paced his chamber. “God pity her, and take her up, when others have cast her off!” Ross Kingman, with the true instincts of a noble brother, had hastened to her assistance. He did not despise her; he did not look coldly upon her; the way of the world was not his way. Eugene was comforted by the reflection that she had a friend in Ross, but he hoped the passionate young man, justly roused to the highest pitch of indignation by his sister’s wrongs, would not encounter Eliot Buckstone. There would be blood shed if he did. Long and weary to Eugene Hungerford were the days and the hours which intervened between the receipt of the intelligence and the sailing of the steamer in which he had engaged passage. Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle had lost their attractions to him; he was anxious to be where he could assure himself that poor Mary was not still suffering. Just as the tug-boat was leaving the landing stage in Liverpool, to convey her passengers to the steamer, lying in the Mersey, the porter of the Washington Hotel, where he had stopped, brought him a package of letters, which had been forwarded by his banker from London. Eagerly he tore them open, to obtain fresh tidings of her who was now always in his thoughts. There was none from Ross Kingman, but Dick Birch wrote that Mary was still in New York; that her brother was with her, and would remain there until she could gain strength to bear the journey to Poppleton. “If I had known what was in that letter of Kingman’s, which I enclosed for you, I would not have sent it,” wrote Dick. “You must be miserable if you have received it. Buckstone is a villain, but everything we can do for poor Mary shall be done.”