you will bring joy and content to our long-harassed hearth!  Tell me so; I beseech you tell me so!  I wish, oh! how I wish, that you would comply from the mere impulse of your own heart!  But, grant that it is a sacrifice; grant that it may be unwise; that it may be vain; I supplicate you to make it!  I, your child, who never deserted you, who will never desert you, pledging my faith to you in the face of heaven; for my sake, I supplicate you to make it.  You do not hesitate; you cannot hesitate; mother, you cannot hesitate.  Ah! you would not if you knew all; if you knew all the misery of my life, you would be glad; you would be cheerful; you would look upon this as an interposition of Providence in favour of your Venetia; you would, indeed, dear mother!’

‘What evil fortune guided our steps to Italy?’ said Lady Annabel in a solemn tone, and as if in soliloquy.

‘No, no, mother; not evil fortune; fortune the best and brightest,’ exclaimed her daughter, ’We came here to be happy, and happiness we have at length gained.  It is in our grasp; I feel it.  It was not fortune, dear mother! it was fate, it was Providence, it was God.  You have been faithful to Him, and He has brought back to you my father, chastened and repentant.  God has turned his heart to all your virtues.  Will you desert him?  No, no, mother, you will not, you cannot; for his sake, for your own sake, and for your child’s, you will not!’

‘For twenty years I have acted from an imperious sense of duty,’ said Lady Annabel, ’and for your sake, Venetia, as much as for my own.  Shall the feelings of a moment—­’

’O mother! dearest mother! say not these words.  With me, at least, it has not been the feeling of a moment.  It haunted my infancy; it harassed me while a girl; it has brought me in the prime of womanhood to the brink of the grave.  And with you, mother, has it been the feeling of a moment?  Ah! you ever loved him, when his name was never breathed by those lips.  You loved him when you deemed he had forgotten you; when you pictured him to yourself in all the pride of health and genius, wanton and daring; and now, now that he comes to you penitent, perhaps dying, more like a remorseful spirit than a breathing being, and humbles himself before you, and appeals only to your mercy, ah! my mother, you cannot reject, you could not reject him, even if you were alone, even if you had no child!’

‘My child! my child! all my hopes were in my child,’ murmured Lady Annabel.

‘Is she not by your side?’ said Venetia.

‘You know not what you ask; you know not what you counsel,’ said Lady Annabel.  ’It has been the prayer and effort of my life that you should never know.  There is a bitterness in the reconciliation which follows long estrangement, that yields a pang more acute even than the first disunion.  Shall I be called upon to mourn over the wasted happiness of twenty years?  Why did he not hate us?’

‘The pang is already felt, mother,’ said Venetia.  ’Reject my father, but you cannot resume the feelings of a month back.  You have seen him; you have listened to him.  He is no longer the character which justified your conduct, and upheld you under the trial.  His image has entered your soul; your heart is softened.  Bid him quit Venice without seeing you, and you will remain the most miserable of women.’