TIME passed on, but all was changed to me now. I carefully concealed the discovery I had made. I had once seen on the table at Deanswood a novel, and had asked General Fairfax what a novel was. "Only a story," he answered. "It is only another name for one." This was all I had ever heard about novels, save once, when I had asked Mrs. Marsh something about them. She had told me they were foolish stories, that I had better not read. This had satisfied me at the time, but was the cause, now, of my concealing my discovery. I had got hold of novels I knew, and dreaded, if it became known, that they might be taken away from me, and that was a thought I could not bear. As to any idea of right or wrong in what I was doing I never gave it a thought. The one thing needful was just the one thing entirely wanting in my training. I read a chapter of the Bible with Mrs. Marsh, as the first part of my lessons always; still went to church with Margery every Sunday; VOL. III. Q and still mechanically repeated a prayer every night and morning; but not one vestige of religious principle had ever been given me. I had not even gained any idea of that from General Fairfax, upright and high principled as he was. I had a sort of vague, uncomfortable feeling about my hidden studies, but not much more than a dread of being scolded if I was found out, and of having the books taken away. My whole life now was a morbid unhealthy dream. I set to work to read through the contents of that chest, in the most systematic way, and every spare moment was spent in the work. I read in my own room, and I carried the books away up to the glen, and read them there, in secret haunts among the rocks beside the stream. Some of these books were merely wild romances, full of sickly sentiment; but some, I am certain now, were far worse; fearfully impure in their tendency, but I believe they did me far less harm than those really less immoral. Their poison, thank God, could not work, and so it fell powerless, and of them I have retained only just sufficient recollection to feel certain they must have been of the worst possible type. But the others quickened into full activity all the vivid imaginative romance of my natural disposition. It was a fatal discovery, indeed, coming as it did, just at the most critical time of a girl's life, and without one single check upon its consequences. I had never seen a fiction before, save the most simple stories for girls, which Mrs. Marsh had sometimes lent me, and those novels were to the girl, what the fairy tales had been to the child. My whole imagination was filled with a host of gentle robbers, and courteous brigands, plunging in chivalrous devotion, amid their thousand crimes, into heroic virtue at the feet of lovely heroines; and then came dreams of love, too, and an intense longing for adventure. A longing that I could steal out by stealth, at night, to meet some adorable unknown in the woods, and hear him vow eternal devotion to me. But then would come the disappointing thought that I was not beautiful enough. These heroines were always radiantly lovely, and no one had ever hinted to me that I was even good-looking, so there was little chance for me. I could only dwell in imagination on the bliss that was too bright ever to be mine. All this went on without those around me having the least idea of the new life into which I had so suddenly passed. It would not have been so, I am certain, had General Fairfax been at home. A man's eye would probably have read deeper than any woman's; certainly deeper than Mrs. Marsh's, who, with all her good qualities, was a very common-place person. As it was, there was nothing to check the mischief, and in six months after I had found those books I was older than, without them, I should have been in two years. How dull and uninteresting the books seemed now which before I had read with interest! and my lessons, too, began to be very distasteful. I, advanced to dreams of love, doing lessons like a child! I began to rebel at the idea, and to think the time had come when I ought to be released from any such necessity. My singing lesson was the only part of my day's work I really liked. Mrs. Marsh occasionally brought me a new song to practise, and it was not very hard to find, among my treasures, some romantic love song which I could set to the air, and sing, in private, with romantic pathos, to some unknown hero. My life was still as devoid of incident as before, but the morbid craving for excitement so rapidly excited by my reading was tolerably well supplied by the books themselves. There must have been an immense number in that chest, for, with the occasional reading over a second time of some special favourite, they lasted me for more than two years. Two years of constant poison; though now, as I look back, I do not believe that the chief poison lay so much in the wild romantic dreams in which they plunged me, as in the utterly false, unreal view of life I learned from them because they were my only pictures of life. Had I known a little more of real life, I might have dreamed the same dreams, but I should have known they were but dreams. As it was they were realities to me, and when at last the terrible waking came, there was no groundwork of truth to save me amid the utter shipwreck of all my visions. I heard regularly from General Fairfax, and wrote regularly to him; and though he never openly expressed any uneasiness about me, I cannot help fancying, from the strain of some of his letters, that there must have been a tone in mine which made him feel anxious. At any rate, he told me, with many expressions of regret, that he feared his absence might extend to nearer three years than two, from the time he left. The two years had more than passed, and I was nearly seventeen, and had got rid of the last remnant of childhood in the shape of short frocks. I was tall for my age, and Mrs. Marsh insisted that I should be advanced to long dresses, and had, too, materially altered the form of my studies. I no longer regularly did lessons, only read with her, and practised both music and drawing. This was a great relief to my dignity. Novel heroines of seventeen studied, though they did not do lessons, so I was satisfied. General Fairfax was to be home before many months were over, and that was a great delight to me. How little either he or I dreamed of the importance of those few months' delay! One bright summer's afternoon I started off for the glen, telling my uncle I should not be home for dinner, and carrying with me one of the last of my cherished romances, which I had not read My favourite reading place was a spot where I had arranged a rustic seat for myself, just above the waterfall. There I sat, lost in the land of romance, until the lengthening shadows warned me that it was time to turn towards home. The path through the glen ran close beside the stream, which it crossed by a rustic bridge just above the fall; from thence it descended rapidly, but irregularly, to the margin of the stream. It was very narrow, rendering it difficult for two people to pass, where the banks were too precipitous to enable either to step off the path. It was a path, in fact, along which a stranger would have done well to proceed cautiously, at least the length of its rapid descent from the fall; but every step was well known to me, and I used generally to run the whole way down. A few yards below the fall it took a sudden turn-just in the middle of one of the steepest descents-round a projecting corner of rock, while on the other side the bank shelved down, almost perpendicularly, several feet, to the tops of the rocks, which there rose between twenty and thirty feet above one of the deepest pools in the stream. I had often thought, with a shudder, of the inevitable consequences of a false step just there, though perfectly fearless as far as my own safety was concerned. I used, when I came to the place, to catch the stem of a young tree growing at the corner, and swing round without a moment's pause. On the day in question I started down the path, humming a song I had learnt that morning. I reached the point, and had just caught the stem for the swing, when I heard a voice exclaim,-" Look out, up there!" The warning came too late; I was swinging round the rock almost before it was uttered, and came with all the crash of so rapid a descent against some one who was slowly ascending. In an instant I was hurled back off the path, and, oh, horror! in another moment I was sliding rapidly and helplessly down the bank, towards the top of the crag! With a despairing shriek I strove |