But while from the words of his child every kindly feeling rose up in the young man’s favour, Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton did not feel the less painfully that Emmeline had indeed spoken rightly:  hopelessness was her lot.  It seemed to both impossible that they could ever consent to behold her the wife of Myrvin, even if his character were cleared of the stigmas which had been cast upon it.  Could they consent to expose their fragile child, nursed as she had been in the lap of luxury and comfort, to all the evils and annoyances of poverty?  They had naturally accustomed themselves to anticipate Emmeline’s marrying happily in their own sphere, and they could not thus suddenly consent to the annihilation of hopes, which had been fondly cherished in the mind of each.

Some little time they remained in conversation, and then Mrs. Hamilton rose to seek the chamber of her suffering child, taking with her indeed but little comfort, save her husband’s earnest assurance that he would leave no means untried to discover Jefferies’ true character, and if indeed Arthur had been accused unjustly.

It was with a trembling hand Mrs. Hamilton softly opened Emmeline’s door, and with a heart bleeding at the anguish she beheld, and which she felt too truly she could not mitigate, she entered, and stood for several minutes by her side unnoticed and unseen.

There are some dispositions in which it is acutely painful to witness sorrow.  Those whom we have ever seen radiant in health, in liveliness, in joy—­so full of buoyancy and hope, they seem as if formed for sunshine alone, as if they could not live in the darkening clouds of woe or care; whose pleasures have been pure and innocent as their own bright beauty; who are as yet unknown to the whispering of inwardly working sin; full of love and gentleness, and sympathy, ever ready to weep for others, though for themselves tears are unknown; creatures, whose warm enthusiastic feelings bind them to every heart capable of generous emotions; those in whom we see life most beautified, most glad.  Oh, it is so sad to see them weep; to feel that even on them sorrow hath cast its blight, and paled the cheek, and dimmed the laughing eye, the speaking smile, and the first grief in such as these is agony indeed:  it is the breaking asunder of every former joy.  They shrink from retrospection, for they cannot bear to feel they are not now as then, and the future shares to them the blackened shadows of the hopeless present.  As susceptible as they are to pleasure so are they to pain; and raised far above others in the enjoyment of the one, so is their grief doubled in comparison with those of more happy, because more even temperaments.  So it was with Emmeline; and her mother felt all this as she stood beside her, watching with tearful sympathy the first real grief of her darling child.  Emmeline had cast herself on her knees beside her couch; she had buried her face in her hands, while the sobs that burst incessantly from her swelling bosom shook her frail figure convulsively; the blue veins in her throat had swelled as if in suffocation, and her fair hair, loosened from its confinement by her agitation, hung wildly around her.