have introduced to an admiring world, equally as to every branch of his family, his fair, honourable and legitimate spouse,—alas! that he had been so imprudent, so weak as to seclude her in oblivion during the first critical months of his marriage, as a being of whom he had been ashamed, and afterwards, by the ambiguity of his explanation, to leave his father under the cruel and fatal supposition that his connection with her was but illegal!—his innocent and deserving wife no better treated than had she sunk so low as to become the object of a criminal amour! It may easily be imagined that such reflections, impressed on the mind of De Brooke since his last interview with his father, were of a nature too poignant for time even to ameliorate,—leaving him the prey of a gloom and despondence more than seemed natural to one who, from habitual cheerfulness of temper and elasticity of spirit, had ever before possessed, in a degree uncommon even in youth, the happy art of dissipating anxieties and forgetting cares. His hilarity, however, was now banished, and a nervous irritability succeeded, which could not fail to alarm the ever-watchful tenderness of his wife.
But not to amplify our narrative and enter into details respecting the sorrows and vicissitudes of De Brooke and his consort, let us, in following
