‘Venetia,’ said her mother, without turning her head, but in a calm, firm tone, ’your father has seen you, has conversed with you.  Between your father and myself there can be nothing to communicate, either of fact or feeling.  Now let us depart.’

‘No, no, not depart!’ said Venetia franticly.  ’You did not say depart, dear mother!  I cannot go,’ she added in a low and half-hysterical voice.

‘Desert me, then,’ said the mother.  ’A fitting consequence of your private communications with your father,’ she added in a tone of bitter scorn; and Lady Annabel moved to depart, but Venetia, still kneeling, clung to her convulsively.

’Mother, mother, you shall not go; you shall not leave me; we will never part, mother,’ continued Venetia, in a tone almost of violence, as she perceived her mother give no indication of yielding to her wish.  ‘Are my feelings then nothing?’ she then exclaimed.  ’Is this your sense of my fidelity?  Am I for ever to be a victim?’ She loosened her hold of her mother’s hand, her mother moved on, Venetia fell upon her forehead and uttered a faint scream.  The heart of Lady Annabel relented when she fancied her daughter suffered physical pain, however slight; she hesitated, she turned, she hastened to her child; her husband had simultaneously advanced; in the rapid movement and confusion her hand touched that of Herbert.

‘I yield her to you, Annabel,’ said Herbert, placing Venetia in her mother’s arms.  ’You mistake me, as you have often mistaken me, if you think I seek to practise on the feelings of this angelic child.  She is yours; may she compensate you for the misery I have caused you, but never sought to occasion!’

‘I am not hurt, dear mother,’ said Venetia, as her mother tenderly examined her forehead.  ‘Dear, dear mother, why did you reproach me?’

‘Forget it,’ said Lady Annabel, in a softened tone; ’for indeed you are irreproachable.’

‘O Annabel!’ said Herbert, ’may not this child be some atonement, this child, of whom I solemnly declare I would not deprive you, though I would willingly forfeit my life for a year of her affection; and your, your sufferance,’ he added.

‘Mother! speak to him,’ said Venetia, with her head on her mother’s bosom, who still, however, remained rigidly standing.  But Lady Annabel was silent.

‘Your mother was ever stern and cold, Venetia,’ said Herbert, the bitterness of his heart at length expressing itself.

‘Never,’ said Venetia, with great energy; ’never; you know not my mother.  Was she stern and cold when she visited each night in secret your portrait?’ said Venetia, looking round upon her astonished father, with her bright grey eye.  ’Was she stern and cold when she wept over your poems, those poems whose characters your own hand had traced?  Was she stern and cold when she hung a withered wreath on your bridal bed, the bed to which I owe my miserable being?  Oh, no, my father! sad was the hour of separation for my mother and yourself.  It may have dimmed the lustre of her eye, and shaded your locks with premature grey; but whatever may have been its inscrutable cause, there was one victim of that dark hour, less thought of than yourselves, and yet a greater sufferer than both, the being in whose heart you implanted affections, whose unfulfilled tenderness has made that wretched thing they call your daughter.’