“Don’t come near me,” said she, coldly—­“you have done that for which I never shall forgive you.  Go at once from my presence, with the mean-spirited creature who has dared to suppose that I would acknowledge as my daughter one who has corrupted and robbed me of my son.  Go!  We are mother and son no longer.  I dissolve the tie.  Go!”

And the mother, whose assumed calmness had given way to a highly excited manner, waved her hand imperatively towards the door.

Ellen, who had started up at the moment Mrs. Linden appeared, now came forward, and, throwing herself at her feet, clasped her hands together, and lifted her sweet pale face and tearful eyes.  For an instant the mother’s face grew dark with passion; then she made a movement as if she were about to spurn the supplicant indignantly, when Charles sprang before her, and lifting Ellen in his arms, bore her from the house, and placed her half fainting in the carriage that still stood at the door.  A hurried direction was given to the driver, who mounted his box and drove off to a hotel, where they passed the night, and, on the next morning, returned home to the city they had left on the previous day.

It was long before a smile lighted the countenance of the young bride.  In silence she upbraided herself for having been the cause of estranging from each other mother and son.

“It was wrong,” she said, in a sad tone, when, after the passage of a month, the subject was conversed about between them with more than usual calmness.  “You should, first of all, have written to your mother, and asked her consent.”

“But I knew she would not give it.  I knew her peculiar prejudices too well.  My only hope was the impression your dear face would make upon her.  I was sure that for her to see you would be to love you.  But I was mistaken.”

“Alas! too sadly mistaken.  We have made her unhappy through life.  Oh! how that thought distresses me.”

“She deserves all the unhappiness she may feel.  For me, I do not pity her.”  Charles Linden said this with a good deal of bitterness.

“Oh!  Charles—­do not speak so—­do not feel so.  She is your mother, and you acted against what you knew to be one of her strongest prejudices,” Ellen said earnestly.  “I do not feel angry with her.  When I think of her, it is with grief, that she is unhappy.  The time may yet come—­pray heaven it come quickly!—­when she will feel differently toward one whose heart she does not know—­when she will love me as a mother.”

“She does not deserve the love of one like you,” was the bitterly spoken reply.

“Ah, Charles! why will you speak so?  It is not right.”