"Pray continue it now," rejoined Thaddeus; "I shall never be more fit to listen. Do, I entreat you."
"Are you sincere in your request? I fear I have already affected you too much."
"No; I am sincere: let me hear it all. Do not hold back anything which relates to that stain to the name of Englishman, who completed his crimes by rendering you wretched!"
"Alas! he did," resumed her ladyship; "for when he returned, which was in consequence of the Earl of Tinemouth's death, my father was also dead, who might have stood between me and my inclinations, and so preserved me from many succeeding sorrows. I sealed my fate, and became Stanhope's wife.
"The father of my husband was then Earl of Tinemouth; and as he had never been averse to our union, he presented me with a cottage on the banks of the Wye, where I passed three delightful years, the happiest of womankind. My husband, my mother, and my infant son formed my felicity; and greatly I prize it—too greatly to be allowed a long continuance!
"At the end of this period, some gay friends paid us a visit. When they returned to town, they persuaded my lord to be of the party. He went; and from that fatal day all my sufferings arose.
"Lord Harwold, instead of being with me in a fortnight, as he had promised, procrastinated his absence under various excuses from week to week, during which interval my Albina was born. Day after day I anticipated the delight of putting her into the arms of her father; but, what a chasm! she was three months old before he appeared; and ah! how changed. He was gloomy to me, uncivil to my mother, and hardly looked at the child."
Lady Tinemouth stopped at this part of her narrative to wipe away her tears. Thaddeus was sitting forward to the table, leaning on his arm, with his hand covering his face. The countess was grateful for an excess of sympathy she did not expect; and taking his other hand, as it lay motionless on his knee, "What a consolation would it be to me," exclaimed she, "durst I entertain a hope that I may one day behold but half such pity from my own son!"
Thaddeus pressed her hand. He did not venture to reply; he could not tell her that she deceived herself even here; that it was not her sorrows only which so affected him, but the remembered agonies of his own mother, whom he did not doubt the capricious villany of this very earl, under the name of Sackville (a name that had struck like a death-bolt to the heart of Thaddeus when he first heard his mother utter it), had devoted to a life of uncomplaining but ceaseless self- reproach. And had he derived his existence from such a man—the reprobate husband of Lady Tinemouth! The conviction humbled him, crushed him, and trod him to the earth. He did not look up, and the countess resumed:
"It would be impossible, my dear sir, to describe to you the gradual changes which assured me that I had lost the heart of my husband. Before the end of the winter he left me again, and I saw him no more until that frightful hour in which he struck me to the ground.