He was not ignorant, and he had left her, and he would not reply to her letter! So fell was her mood, that an endeavour to conjure up the scene of her sitting beside the death-bed of Matthew Weyburn's mother, failed to sober and smooth it, holy though that time was.

The false heart she had put into the pride of her name was powerfuller than the heart in her bosom.

But to what end had the true heart counselled her of late?
It had been a home of humours and languors, an impotent insurgent, the sapper of her character; and as we see in certain disorderly States a curative incendiarism usurp the functions of the sluggish citizen, and the work of re-establishment done by destruction, in peril of a total extinction, Aminta's feverish anger on behalf of her name went a stretch to vivify and give her dulled character a novel edge.

She said good-bye to cowardice.

'I have no husband to defend me--I must do it for myself.' The peril of a too complete exercise of independence was just intimated to her perceptions.