Raised to the Peerage

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 36 CHAPTER III. FOES, FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC. The guests had all departed, and with the last of them, her husband and her daughter; Mrs. Sheffield was alone with Darnley in the great empty solitude of Wentworth Manor. The first feeling she experienced was one of relief. They had gone, and the overpowering fear of discovery was at an end for the present. The secret of her son's unhappy attachment remained undivulged. No explanation with Mr. Sheffield had taken place. But the curse of concealment, the ban of dishonour, was already making itself keenly felt in her mind. Although free from present dread, secure that no counter-influence couldas yet militate against her plans, from her husband's cognizance of the nature and cause of their child's illness, her scheming brain could rest neither night nor day. She was fully alive to the possibility of Mr. Sheffield's receiving from other sources the information she had successfully endeavoured to keep back by constant surveillance over the invalid. In this case all would, she felt, be at an end. Of the nature of her husband's decision, she entertained no doubt, for his rectitude was uncompromising. She resolutely shut her eyes against the contemplation of such a contingency. Not that for a moment she quailed at the prospect of the boldness necessary to act out her self-imposed task. Her powerful mind grasped in instantaneous concentration every danger, even estimated those chances at the uttermost, which were likely to oppose themselves to the success of her schemes. But in proportion to the magnitude of the stake for which she played, so rose the courage within her?alas, that it should have had so ignoble an aim! The moral sense, once perverted, rapidly grew less sensitive; with every freshreverie upon this all-engrossing...