companying Godolphin; Godolphin never dreamed of demanding it. These are the connexions of the great world: my good reader, learn the great world as you look at them!

All was soon settled. Godolphin was easily disembarrassed of his commission. Six hundred a year from his fortune was allowed him during his minority. On this he might well play a decorous part, not, indeed, as the English seigneur, but as the citizen of the world. At the age of little more than sixteen, but with a character which premature independence had half formed and also half enervated, the young Godolphin saw the shores of England recede before him, and felt himself alone in the universe-the lord of his own fate.

CHAPTER X.

THE EDUCATION OF CONSTANCE'S MIND.

MEANWHILE, Constance Vernon grew up in womanhood and beauty. All around her contributed to feed that stern remembrance which her father's dying words had bequeathed. Naturally proud, quick, susceptible, she felt slights, often merely incidental, with a deep and brooding resentment. The forlorn and dependant girl could not, indeed, fail to meet with many bitter proofs that her situation was not forgotten by a world in which prosperity and station are the cardinal virtues. Many a loud whisper, many an intentional "aside," reached her haughty ear and coloured her pale cheek. Such accidents increased her early-formed asperity of thought; chilled the gushing flood of her young affections; and sharpened, with a relentless edge, her bitter and caustic hatred to a society she deemed at once insolent and worthless. To a taste intuitively fine and

noble, the essential vulgarities-the fierceness to-day; the cringing to-morrow; the veneration for power; the indifference to virtue, which characterized the framers and rulers of "society"-could not but bring contempt as well as anger; and, amid the brilliant circles to which so many aspirers looked up with hopeless ambition, Constance moved only to ridicule, to loathe, to despise.

So strong, so constantly nourished was this sentiment of contempt, that it lasted with equal bitterness when Constance afterward became the queen and presider over that great world in which she now shone to dazzle, but not to rule. What at first might have seemed an exaggerated and insane prayer on the part of the father, grew, as her experience ripened, a natural and laudable command. She was thrown entirely with that party amid whom were his early friends and his late deserters. She resolved to humble the crested arrogance around her, as much from her own desire as from the wish to obey and revenge her father. From contempt for rank rose naturally the ambition of rank. The young beauty resolved to banish love from her heart; to devote herself to one aim and object; to win title and station, that she might be able to give power and permanence to her disdain of those qualities in others; and in the secrecy of night she repeated the vow which consoled her father's deathbed, and solemnly resolved to crush love within her heart, and marry solely for station and for power.

As the daughter of so celebrated a politician, it was natural that Constance should take interest in politics. She lent to every discussion of state events an eager and thirsty ear. She embraced with masculine ardour such sentiments as were then considered the extreme of liberality; and she looked on that career which society limits to man as the noblest, the loftiest in the world. She secretly cursed her lot that she was a woman, and prevented from personally carrying into effect the sentiments she passionately espoused. Meanwhile, she did not neglect, or suffer to rust, the bright

weapon of a wit which imbodied, at times, all the biting energies of her contempt. To insolence she retorted sarcasm; and, early able to see that society, like virtue, must be trampled upon in order to yield forth its incense, she rose into respect by the hauteur of her manner, the bluntness of her satire, the independence of her mind, far more than by her various accomplishments and her unrivalled beauty.

Of Lady Erpingham she had nothing to complain; kind, easy, insouciante, and characterless, her protectress sometimes wounded her by carelessness, but never through design; on the contrary, the countess at once loved and admired her, and was as anxious that her protégée should form a brilliant alliance as if she had been her own daughter. Constance therefore loved Lady Erpingham with sincere and earnest warmth, and endeavoured to forget all the commonplaces and littlenesses of character which made up the mind of her protectress, and which otherwise would have been precisely of that nature to which one like Constance would have been the least indulgent.

CHAPTER XI.

CONVERSATION BETWEEN LADY ERPINGHAM AND CONSTANCE. FARTHER PARTICULARS OF GODOLPHIN'S FAMILY, ETC.

LADY ERPINGHAM was a widow; her jointure, for she had been an heiress and a duke's daughter, was large; and the noblest mansion of all the various seats póssessed by the wealthy and powerful house of Erpingham had been allotted by her late lord for her widowed residence. Thither she went punctually on the first of every August, and quitted it punctually on the eighth of every January.

It was some years after the date of Godolphin's departure from England, and the summer following the spring in which Constance had been "brought out;" and after a début of such splendour that at this day (many years subsequent to that period) the sensation she created is not only a matter of remembrance but of conversation, Constance, despite the triumph of her vanity, was not displeased to seek some refuge, even from admiration, among the shades of Wendover Castle.

"When," said she one morning, as she was walking with Lady Erpingham upon a terrace beneath the windows of the castle, which overlooked the country for miles, “when will you go with me, dear Lady Erpingham, to see those ruins, of which I have heard so much and so often, and which I have never been able to persuade you to visit? Look! the day is so clear that we can see their outline now-there, to the right of that church! They cannot be so very far from Wendover." Godolphin Priory is about twelve miles off," said Lady Erpingham; "but it may seem nearer, for it is situated on the highest spot of the county. Poor Arthur Godolphin! he is lately dead!" Lady Erpingham sighed.

66

"I never heard you speak of him before."

"There might be a reason for my silence, Constance. He was the person, of all whom I ever saw, who appeared to me, when I was your age, the most fascinating. Not, Constance, that I was in love with him, or that he gave me any reason to become so through gratitude for any affection on his part. It was a girl's fancy, idle and short-lived-nothing more !"

"And the young Godolphin-the boy who, at so early an age, has made himself known for his eccentric life abroad?"

"Is his son; the present owner of those ruins, and, I fear, of little more, unless it be the remains of a legacy received from a relation."

"Was the father extravagant, then?"

"Not he! But his father had exceeded a patrimony greatly involved, and greatly reduced from its ancient

importance. All the lands we see yonder-those villages, those woods-once belonged to the Godolphins. They were the most ancient and the most powerful family in this part of England; but the estates dwindled away with each successive generation; and when Arthur Godolphin, my Godolphin, succeeded to the property, nothing was left for him but the choice of three evils-a profession, obscurity, or a wealthy marriage. My father, who had long destined me for Lord Erpingham, insinuated that it was in me that Mr. Godolphin wished to find the resource I have last mentioned, and that in such resource was my only attraction in his eyes. I have some reason to believe he proposed to the duke; but he was silent to me, from whom, girl as I was, he might have been less certain of refusal." "What did he at last?"

Married a lady who was supposed to be an heiress; but he had scarcely enjoyed her fortune a year before it became the subject of a lawsuit. He lost the cause and the dowry; and, what was worse, the expenses of litigation, and the sums he was obliged to refund, reduced him to what, for a man of his rank, might be considered absolute poverty. He was thoroughly chagrined and soured by this event; retired to those ruins, or, rather, to the small cottage that adjoins them, and there lived to the day of his death, shunning society, and certainly not exceeding his income."

I understand you: he became parsimonious." "To the excess which his neighbours called miserly."

66 And his wife?"

"Poor woman! she was a mere fine lady, and died, I believe, of the same vexation which nipped, not the life, but the heart of her husband."

"Had they only one son ?"

"Only the present owner: Percy, I think-yes, Percy; it was his mother's surname-Percy Godolphin." "And how came this poor boy to be thrown so early on the world? Did he quarrel with Mr. Godolphin." "I believe not: but, when Percy was about fifteen, he