Dalhousie and his wife, by the kind attentions of their host, were restored to a comparatively healthy state. The lady had suffered much in her physical and mental constitution, and a shade of deep melancholy rested upon her handsome features. She could not forget the horrors of the dungeon in which she had been confined. It seemed a great epoch in her life; all before it was strange and undefined, while every trivial incident since was a great paragraph in her history.
Mr. Faxon was seated in his library, surrounded by his guests. The affairs of the Dumont family had again been discussed, for to them they were full of interest.
The good minister feelingly expatiated upon the bitterness of the heiress' lot, brought up as she had been amid all the refinements of polished society, whose sensibilities were rendered doubly acute by nature and the circumstances which environed her, to be thus degraded into the condition of a base-born, despised being,—to be so suddenly hurled from honor and opulence,—it was a dreadful blow! So feelingly did he narrate the particulars, so tenderly did he describe the loneliness of her position, that his hearers were deeply affected, and Delia shed a flood of tears.
"I too have been a wanderer, though a voluntary one, from the home of my father," said she.
"Nay, Delia," said Dalhousie, tenderly; "do not revert to your own experience. Remember you are not strong enough to bear much excitement."
"I did not intend to speak of my own experience; but the sufferings of poor Miss Dumont call to my mind the remembrance of similar feelings."
"I presume the company are not desirous of hearing the story of an elopement," said Dalhousie, with a smile.
"Nor I to relate one. The pure devotion of Miss Dumont to the memory of her father recalls the affection, the fond indulgence, of my own father. I have not, as she has, the consciousness of having never wilfully abused his confidence."
"If you have erred, madam," said Mr. Faxon, "your father still lives, does he not? Perhaps it is not yet too late to atone for the fault."
"Alas! I know not whether he is living or not. I wrote to him several times, but never received an answer."