“Your mother, accustomed to retirement, and completely happy in the participation of its rational pleasures, with one whose taste and feelings harmonized entirely with her own, yielded, with secret reluctance, to her husband’s wishes, and exchanged that peaceful retreat, for the brilliant, but heartless scenes of fashionable life.  The world was new to her, and no wonder if her unpractised eye was dazzled by the splendor of its pageantry.  She entered a magic circle, and was borne round the ceaseless course with a rapidity which threw a deceitful lustre on every object, and concealed the falseness of its colors.  She became the idol of a courtly throng; poets sung her praises, and admirers sighed around her.  Her heart remained uncorrupted by flattery; but, young and inexperienced, buoyant with health and spirits, no wonder that she yielded to the fascinations which surrounded her, or that her thoughts reverted less frequently, and less fondly, to those calm pleasures which had once constituted her only happiness.  Her affection for her husband was undiminished; but the world now claimed that time and attention, which, in retirement, had been devoted to him; and, engrossed by amusements, every intellectual pursuit was abandoned; and domestic privacy, with its attendant sympathies and united interests, was, at length, entirely banished.

“De Courcy, chagrined by a change, which his experience in life should have enabled him to foresee, became melancholy and abstracted; he often secluded himself from society, entrusting his wife to some other protection, or, when induced to enter scenes which had become irksome to him, he watched, with jealousy, even the most trifling attentions that were offered her.  He, who possessed such a heart, should never have doubted its truth, or wounded her affection by distrusting its fervor and sincerity.  He had led her into the fatal vortex, and one word from him could have dissolved the spell; the slightest expression of his wishes, would, at any moment, have drawn her from pleasures of which she already wearied; and, amid the sweet tranquillity of nature, they might have regained that happiness, which had withered in the ungenial atmosphere of artificial life.  But he was too proud to acknowledge the weakness he indulged; and when she besought him, even with tears, to explain the cause of his altered conduct, he answered her evasively, or repulsed her with a coldness, which she felt more keenly than the bitterest reproaches.  Confidence, the strongest link of affection, was broken, and the golden chain trembled with the shock.

“Nothing is more galling to an ingenuous mind, than a consciousness, that the actions and feelings are misconstrued by those to whom the heart has been opened with that perfect trust and unreserve, which ought to place them beyond the shadow of suspicion.  Your mother deeply felt the injustice of those doubts; and perhaps, a little natural resentment mingled with and augmented the pain, which rankled in her inmost