Young Mowbray had just taken a distinguished degree at Oxford, and having given a farewell banquet to his college friends, returned home with the hope of speedily obtaining the commission in a regiment of horse for which his name had been long ago put down by his father.
It was at this time that several circumstances occurred at Wrexhill sufficiently important to the principal personages of my narrative to be recorded at some length.
CHAPTER X.
FANNY'S RELIGION.—A VISIT TO OAKLEY.
It was towards the end of November that young Mowbray returned from Oxford to his mother's house in Hampshire. As usual, the first three or four hours' chat with Helen and Rosalind put him au fait of all that had taken place during his absence. The retrospect was not a cheering one; yet most of the circumstances which tended to annoy him were of that minor kind which none but a very gossiping correspondent would detail—and Helen was not such. Besides, since the mysterious letter which had recalled Charles to keep watch over Fanny, (the full and true purpose of which letter he had never yet discovered,) Miss Torrington had not written to him; and as she was now the chief historian, her round and unvarnished tale made him acquainted with many particulars to which Helen had scarcely alluded in her correspondence with him.
Helen Mowbray's was not a spirit to exhaust itself and its sorrows by breathing unavailing complaints; and though her brother had pretty clearly understood from her letters that she was not happy or comfortable at home, it was from Rosalind he first learned how many circumstances were daily occurring to make her otherwise.
The only point on which he blamed her, or in which, according to Rosalind's account, she had shown more yielding, and, as he called it, weakness than her helpless and most unhappy position rendered unavoidable, was in the never having attempted to see Lady Harrington. This he declared was in itself wrong, and rendered doubly so by her situation, which would have rendered the society and counsel of such a friend invaluable. But he did not know—even Rosalind did not know—that this forbearance for which he blamed her was the result of those qualities for which they most loved her. But Helen knew, though they did not, that if she had gone to Oakley, she should have thought more of hearing news of Colonel Harrington than of any advice her godmother could have given her, and have been infinitely more anxious to learn if he ever mentioned her in his letters, than to know whether Lady Harrington thought it best that she should be civil, or that she should be rude, in her demeanour towards the Vicar of Wrexhill.
It was this conscious weakness which lent strength to the unreasonable violence of her mother on this point. Had Helen been quite fancy-free and altogether heart-whole, she would have had courage to discover that a passionate prohibition, originating, as she could not doubt it did, with a man for whom she entertained no species of esteem, ought not to make her abandon one of the kindest friends she had ever known. But there is a feeling stronger than reason in a young girl's breast; and again and again this feeling had whispered to Helen,
"'It is not maidenly—'