Page 111 (2/2)

In Herbert Dorrance's honest admiration and assiduous courtship the

most suspicious scrutiny could detect no tincture of either of these

feelings, and it was not long before she took refuge in his society

froered by the supposed

exhibition of them in others Here was one th, breadth, and depth, as a

witness of her daily chastiseuardian's hands,

yet who esteeraded by punishment Gratitude had a powerful auxiliary in her

feverish longing to escape from scenes that kept alive to the quick,

memories she would have annihilated, had her ability been

commensurate with her will All other associations with the house in

which she, and her father before her, had been born, and in which

she had passed her childhood and girlish days, were overrun by the

thickly thronging and pertinacious recollections of the two short

weeks Frederic Chilton had spent there with her He haunted her

walks and drives; trod, by her side, the resounding floor of the

vine-covered portico, sat with her in parlor and halls; sang to her

accompaniment when she would have exorcised the phantom by

music--was always, whenever and wherever he appeared--the tender,

ingenuous, manly youth she had loved and reverenced as the

iod who iels, and beheld in the end,--with besraced sensualist, not merely a deceiver of

another woman's innocent confidence, and her tempter to dishonor and

wretchedness, but a poltroon--a whipped coho had not dared to

lift voice or pen in denial or extenuation of his crime