cultivated taste and the tender sentiment which finds delightful occupation in preparing a house for a beloved object had not been called into operation in the arrangement and decoration of the abode to which robert streightley brought his bride in the early spring which succeeded their marriage. these motive powers had, however, been efficiently replaced by the care and experience of a first-rate london upholsterer; and a more refined and exigeant taste than that of the young mistress of middlemeads might have pronounced a favourable judgment upon the result. there was, indeed, nothing ancient about the mansion but the mansion itself. its family associations were all with those from whose keeping it had passed, and by the change had lost the subtle touch of dignity which lingers about a residence within whose walls many lines of the same race have begun and ended. it had none of those grand though dingy pieces de famille which lent an air of refinement and meaning to the faded house in queen anne street; but it was a home which any man might be proud to inaugurate--a home to which all these things might be suitably added in time. seen as katharine streightley saw it first, with the tender glory of the spring upon the woods, with the sunshine pouring down upon the grand old fa?ade, and the joyous music of innumerable birds piercing the pure air, her new home elicited an exclamation of delighted surprise from her, which was eagerly welcomed by robert. he had seen but rarely of late any evidence of the enthusiasm and freshness of heart which had been among the first and most potent of katharine's charms for him. he had looked for them in vain when new scenes and new impressions might have been expected to call them forth during their travels; but they had rewarded his search so rarely, that he had begun to wonder if he was ever again to see that peculiar smile, like sudden sunshine, in the eyes whose beauty had grown sombre of late, or to recognise that keen trill of girlish pleasure in the voice whose refined intonation had acquired depth and seriousness since he had heard it first. robert streightley knew very little of the woman he had married, as little of her strength as of her weakness; and the passionate ardour of his love for her, the undiminished admiration with which he regarded her, were accompanied with all the interest and curiosity attendant upon a new study. his narrow experience of life, his little knowledge of women, preserved him from much pain in the present at least. it never occurred to him to impute the alteration in katharine to its true source. he had taken mr. guyon's word for the trifling nature of the sentiment entertained by his daughter for gordon frere, though even at that period it is probable he would have hesitated at taking mr. guyon's word upon any other subject; and though he could not deceive himself so far as to believe that his beautiful wife reciprocated the feelings with which he regarded her, he never ceased to hope that in time she would come to love him. at least he would deserve her love, if unlimited indulgence, if ceaseless observance, if the gratification of every wish, every fantasy could merit it. at least he would atone---- and when robert's meditations reached that point they were apt to become very uncomfortable, and he would fall back upon the recollection of his wealth, and of all that he intended to do with it solely for katharine's benefit and pleasure, and he would say in his heart, "at all events, frere could have given her nothing that she values; for she likes luxury and pleasure--she is quite a woman of the world." in saying which he, the poor fellow, believed he passed an eulogium upon her; for that "world," seen through the medium of his passion, had quite bewildered his fancy and obscured his judgment.

it was, therefore, with intense pleasure that robert observed the glow of satisfaction, the eager alacrity with which katharine inspected the house and grounds; that he noted the bright eyes and glowing smiles with which she praised all the arrangements made for her comfort, and approved of the scale and order of the household. the irrepressible girlishness of her age aided her in these circumstances. it was quite impossible not to feel pride and delight in such possessions; and she felt them to the full. ignorant as she had been of the real state of her father's affairs, and guiltless of the false pretences of their life in london, she had always had a vague sense of insecurity; she had always been annoyed by a dearth of ready-money; she had constantly found herself wishing papa would give her a cheque when she went out shopping, and would not oblige her to remain so long and so deeply in her milliner's debt; and now she felt the contrast in the sense of an unexplained but intense relief. the perfect order, the luxury, the quiet of her house, the beauty of the gardens and the woods, the deference, the observance with with which she was treated--differing widely from the capricious caresses of her father, under which her keen intelligence detected the unscrupulousness, selfishness, and the contempt for her sex from which her pride and her delicacy revolted--the novel sense of the importance of her position,--all these united to rouse katharine from the coldness and bitterness of feeling which had succeeded the awakening from her love-trance. she thought in after-days that during the time which immediately succeeded her arrival at middlemeads she had not been far from loving her husband. certain it is that she thought less of her false lover, that she nourished her anger against him less sedulously, that she fed less upon the poisonous fruit of pride, rage, and mortification. she took pleasure in the beauty and luxury which surrounded her: she owed it all to robert; she could hardly look upon and enjoy it without feeling some gratitude to the giver, without some softening of the pride of her resentful heart, without some more tender and womanly sentiment than that she had purchased all this at the price of herself, and it was but her right. the love which she could not deny, which she was forced to acknowledge, to wonder at every day since she had been robert's wife, had at first inspired her only with contemptuous wonder; she treated it with disdain in her thoughts, as another proof of the reckless selfishness of men. here was one ready and willing to pay any price for the gratification of a fancy. so much the better! he had his reward; and her father's needs were supplied, and her defeat and mortification covered by the same means. but was she bound to feel any affection or gratitude to this man in consequence? he loved her for his own sake, not for hers; it was a selfish passion, and he was rich enough to buy its object; that was all. it suited her to be sold; and there was the whole transaction. love and gratitude had no part in it, could never have any part in any thing in which she should be concerned any more. gordon frere was a poor man, she believed: well, she could have been grateful to him if he had shared his narrow means with her, and incurred the anger of his family for her sake; she could have been very happy and very good. but what was the use of thinking of these things? he had only amused himself with her. was she to be grateful to this man, who had merely purchased her, as he might have purchased any other expensive object which it pleased him to possess. they would get on very well together, no doubt. she had no fear of any disagreements; she trusted, with reason, in her own high breeding and her entire indifference; and then rich people never need quarrel and be disagreeable to each other, the restrictions of life were not for them; finally, it did not much matter, after all. katharine believed that she had discovered life to be a swindle, and that she should never more be deceived. this was already a sufficiently lamentable effect of the disappointment she had sustained. with such a character, what might not result from a discovery of the whole truth--from a discovery that the man she loved had never been false to her, and that the marriage into which she had entered in self-defence was the basest of transactions!

for the present no such discovery was within the reach of calculation or apprehension, and robert revelled in the new-born graciousness of katharine's manner and in the revival of her girlish brightness. a little sense of duty now; a little of that training in principle, that discipline in well-doing, which only a mother's care, or that of a woman fitted to replace a mother, can bestow; and a life of happiness and usefulness might have begun for katharine. but all such influences were wanting; and the instincts for good which made themselves heard occasionally in her tempestuous soul were but impulses--they had no root in themselves, and they withered away. the future process by which they were to be planted, and watered, and given increase, would be full of pain no doubt, as every such process of cultivation of the human soul must be; in those early days at middlemeads it had not begun. the joyous, gracious manner which shed sunshine into her husband's heart was but the ebullition of katharine's girlish pleasure, and the natural demonstration of a perfectly well-bred woman, to whom it was pleasant to be gracefully grateful, and to whom polished prettiness of speech was "free as bird on branch." it sufficed to create an elysium for robert, who found it easy to accommodate himself to the change in all his habits and in his manner of living, and to whom each day brought a renewed opportunity of ministering to his wife's tastes and pleasures.

among the earliest of their visitors was ellen streightley, who had received a polite invitation from katharine, a few days after her arrival in england. this invitation had included mrs. streightley; but there had been no serious wish on the part of katharine that it should be accepted, and a satisfactory conviction that there was no danger of such an event. any thing like rapprochement between his mother and his wife was beyond robert's expectation, almost beyond his desire. they belonged to two distinct worlds of thought, feeling, habits, and ideas; and though he comprehended the fact rather by instinct than by perception, he did comprehend it too fully to be led into any danger of making an effort to bring them together, which must be unsuccessful, and might be disastrous. mrs. streightley's naturally quiet temper had made her accept robert's marriage with tranquil acquiescence. her son would be less widely parted from her than most sons from their mothers, under such circumstances; they would still have many subjects of common interest, and she must be content with that. she had never seriously expected that robert would make a selection from their narrow circle; she had not expected that he would be attracted by the miss pratts and the miss perkinses of the brixton connection, who exchanged patterns for berlin-wool work and manuscript music with ellen, who wore oxford-street bonnets, and took notes of sunday's sermon and wednesday evening's lecture. she had been content so long as robert made no choice at all, but devoted himself exclusively to his business; and now that he had chosen a beautiful, fashionable young lady, whose habits, whose pursuits, whose very speech was all but unintelligible to her, she would be content still. her religious principles were largely assisted by her natural temperament; and their combined action made her the most inoffensive, the most distant, and the most silent of mothers-in-law.

"but you have never seen my fine country-house, mother; you will surely come and see it," robert remonstrated, when his mother requested him to bear her excuses to katharine.

"i shall see it in time, my dear," she answered, "never fear; but you must let me have my own way; you know i have always had it;" and she smiled gently, with the touching smile of the old looking back upon the past "your wife must have many friends whom she wishes to see. i could neither bear to find myself among fine people, to whom i am totally unaccustomed, nor to feel that i was excluding her friends. you will be constantly in town, robert, and you will come and see me very often." and then she began to speak of his health, to inquire into the details of katharine's illness at martigny; and robert saw that the matter must remain as it was for the present. it was, however, decided that ellen should accept katharine's invitation; and accordingly she made her appearance at middlemeads within a fortnight of katharine's installation in her new house. it would have needed a less kindly nature than katharine's--in which, perverted as it was, true womanly feeling had its place--to resist the frank and innocent gaiety of ellen, the na?f pleasure which she showed in the inspection of the house, her admiration of the luxurious furniture, and her surprise at finding herself in a scene of such unaccustomed splendour, and yet, after a fashion, at home there. all this was her brother's--all this was robert's, who had been so well content with the modest comfort of the brixton villa; and the beautiful young woman who had inspired him with tastes thus gratified, and admitted him into a circle of society of which ellen had never before had even a glimpse, was her own sister-in-law. she had a kind of prescriptive right to be intimate with her; she wondered whether she might venture to call her "katharine." not on the first day of her visit certainly; for though katharine was perfectly polite, there was no approach to familiarity in her manner; and she inquired, at luncheon, whether "miss streightley" would drive, in a tone which seemed to render any such sisterly appellations as "ellen" and "katharine" hopeless. but this did not last: they were, after all, two young girls; and the very superiority of intellect and of breeding, of which katharine was conscious, made her readier to thaw towards ellen, whose admiration of her brother's beautiful wife was as sincere and single-hearted as it was warm and humble. the warnings of the rev. decimus lost their power over the girl's imagination; she yielded to the charm which katharine exercised over all whom she chose to attract, and was almost as much dazzled as her brother. to robert the good understanding which subsisted between the two was a source of the purest pleasure; he loved his sister dearly, and he had a sense of her piety, her gentleness, her humility of mind, and the beneficence of such an influence, though he had never defined these things to his own mind or reasoned upon them. on the whole, these early days at middlemeads were good days; they were a fair seedtime, and the harvest might have been blessed; but the enemy had sown the tares early, and they were destined to flourish in sinister strength.

as for katharine, the genuine affection and admiration with which her sister-in-law regarded her soon began to be sweet and precious to her; her former life had been isolated from all such ties of girlish friendship and confidence, and she had despised them in theory, holding them among the missish follies which she laughed at and held herself above. she had aspired to the reputation of a woman of the world, and she had attained it; and in right of it had no intimacies except of convenience, and no relations with her own sex except those of the most superficial social observance. to katharine, therefore--who had not, since she left the elegant establishment in which she had acquired all the graces with which nature had not previously supplied her, had any more congenial companion for the hours not absolutely demanded by society than lady henmarsh--the novelty of such a friendship as that offered her by ellen streightley possessed an ineffable charm. the purity, the simplicity, the very narrowness of the girl's mind pleased her; the unquestioning submission with which she received her opinions, the unqualified admiration which she evinced in every look and word, conveyed, by their simple sincerity, the subtlest charm of flattery. katharine felt that ellen's presence did her good; that the peace of mind which pervaded her diffused a tranquil and wholesome atmosphere around her: she did not know whence came the salutary influence; she had never been taught to recognise piety and principle by their peaceable fruits; but she felt all that she did not analyse; and above all she became conscious that she was beginning to live less for herself--that she was acquiring new, unselfish, and harmless interests. her heart had begun to soften in those days; she was won by the artless confidence of the girl to whom she was an object of wondering admiration, and the wrath and bitterness of her soul began to subside.

the last thing in the world to occur to such a mind as that of ellen streightley would have been such a possibility as a marriage without perfect affection and confidence. she had never met with an instance of any thing so dreadful and unnatural out of a novel; and the rev. decimus disapproved of novels, so that she had discontinued their perusal, and had even had the hardihood to endeavour to induce katharine to do likewise, and to substitute the interesting details of the missionary record, over which she was accustomed to shiver and cry a good deal. thus, ellen never doubted for a moment that katharine's had been, in the language of young ladies, "a love-match;" and the matter-of-course way in which she took this for granted, founded all her talk to katharine upon it, and treated her brother and his wife as absolutely one in undivided interest and unreserved confidence, though, no doubt, a conclusive evidence of ellen's own dullness of perception, had all the good effect which an opposite quality, and the exercise of the most perfect tact, could have produced. it was impossible to resist the influence of this frank and perfect belief in the mutual good faith of their relation; it was impossible to resist the gay and happy simplicity which persisted in believing in its ideal; and, but for the sore spot in katharine's heart, so obstinately hidden, and the sorer spot in robert's conscience, which ever and anon pained him horribly and vainly, the angel of peace might have found an abiding resting-place with them then. the soft rustle of his wings was often audible to both in those early days; to which they were destined to look back in the future with vain yearning and regret.

"were you not surprised, robert, to hear of hester's good fortune?" said ellen streightley to her brother one morning, as the little party were engaged in the pleasing occupation of reading their letters, of which an unusually large number had been laid upon the breakfast-table.

"yes," said robert, raising his eyes from a letter which he had been reading with a moody and troubled expression. "yes, i was indeed, and very much pleased. she was an admirable example of industry and courage. i never could bear to think of a woman having to work; that is a man's part in life. is your letter from hester?" he asked, in a tone of interest.

"o yes," said ellen; "hester is just the same to me as ever, though matilda perkins said she wouldn't be, and i must be very silly to imagine a rich heiress would care about me. i can't think how people can be so mean; can you, robert? only fancy any one imagining that money can influence people in that way! i am ashamed to say she made me feel almost afraid of hester; and i cannot tell you how relieved i was when i found her just the same. i was very near confessing to her that i had wronged her in my thoughts; but then i knew they were not my thoughts, but matilda perkins's; and i had no business to tell her sins, you know; and after all, perhaps she was not so much to blame,--she did not know hester as well as i do."

katharine, who had laid aside her letters, and was now busily crumbling bread into a saucer half-full of cream--an operation which her beautiful little maltese dog, topaze, watched with placid but appreciative interest--smiled at the ingenious eagerness with which ellen sought to exculpate one friend and to exalt another. robert's attention strayed from his sister; his eyes were following the movements of his wife's slender fingers. she placed the saucer on the ground and called her dog.

"here, topaze, come and eat your breakfast!--and now, ellen, tell me all about this wonderful miss gould. she is tremendously rich, isn't she, and very handsome, blue, and bel esprit, and all the rest of it?"

ellen looked rather puzzled as she said, "hester is very rich, certainly; but i am not sure about her being very handsome; she always seemed so to me, of course--but then i knew her so well."

"and every one is handsome whom you know well?" said katharine laughing. "what a beauty your brother must be, and mr. dutton, and i--after a while, when you know me long enough!"

"you know quite well that you are a beauty now and always, to me and to every one," said ellen with beaming eyes; "and it is wicked of you to laugh at me because i cannot exactly express what i mean. hester is not beautiful like you, so that every one must acknowledge and no one can deny her beauty; but i love her face. and she is very clever, wonderfully clever. robert, have you never told katharine about hester? she used to be quite one of ourselves, you know. she knows all about you, katharine, and takes the greatest interest in you."

"does she?" said katharine with rather a vacant smile.

"o yes; and--katharine," said ellen timidly, "i should so like her to know you, i should so like my two best friends to be acquainted--and--and she is so accustomed to be with me and robert--and i have told her so much about middlemeads, that--if you don't think i take a liberty in asking you----"

"you would wish me to invite miss gould here, you mean, my dear ellen?" said katharine with her most graceful air; "and you stammer about it as if i were a tigress, and you were afraid to ask so trifling a favour in your brother's house. you are a dear silly little goose,--go pluck one of your own quills, and send off your invitation to your friend immediately. ask her for tuesday--lady henmarsh comes to-morrow, and we must have her and sir timothy casés before any one else arrives."

katharine rose as she spoke, and ellen did the same, turning with sparkling eyes to her brother.

"o, robert, do you hear what katharine says?" she exclaimed. "she desires me to invite hester to middlemeads; and i hardly dare tell you how i longed for her to come here. is she not kind?"

"yes, indeed," said robert; but he spoke rather absently. "she is--i am sure we shall be delighted to see hester here."

"come, ellen," said katharine; "i am going to look after my hyacinths: leave your brother to his letters, and come with me."

a minute later the two girls passed by the window of the room in which robert sat, still engaged in what was apparently no pleasant task. he looked up as their voices caught his ear, drew near to the window, and followed the graceful figures with thoughtful, regretful eyes, until they disappeared. then he sighed deeply, and gathering up his papers left the room.

half an hour later robert sought his wife and sister in the garden, and found them in deep conversation with the gardener, a scotchman of unparalleled skill and obstinacy.

"i beg your pardon, katharine," he said, "but i overlooked this letter this morning. it is from your father, enclosed to me, from paris. it must have fallen out when i opened his."

"thank you," said katharine carelessly, as she took the note from his hand and stuck it into her belt; then resumed her conversation with the gardener. ellen felt rather surprised that katharine could possibly defer the reading of a letter from her father, and recurred to the matter again as she sat down to her desk to enjoy the delight of sending off the longed-for invitation to hester gould. she had seen mr. guyon at his daughter's wedding, but only on that occasion, and she had not been particularly attracted by him.

"could it be possible that he was not kind to katharine, and that she is not very fond of him?" thought the guileless ellen, to whom any perversion of the relations and duties of life was almost inconceivable and incredible. she shook her simple head gravely at the suspicion, and then proceeded to write a gushing letter to miss gould, in answer to that which she had received, and in which, had she indulged a second person with its perusal, that individual would have discerned a very distinct intimation that the writer expected and exacted from ellen that she should obtain precisely such an invitation as katharine had so readily and gracefully suggested.