Teresa was pleased to find herself again at home without having encountered Sedley; and a few days afterwards she read his departure for the Continent in a newspaper.

Teresa was conscious that she was the cause of his leaving home and country, and many bitter tears did she shed over the few cold words announcing his departure.

One morning Catherine Brand received an invitation to pass some weeks with her aunt Derby, which she showed to Teresa, saying, with a smile, "My aunt is really very considerate! She wishes me to leave London just at the moment when it is most attractive; and, besides this consideration, her's is the most tire. some neighbourhood in England. Now, there are no young people, and Sedley, the agreeable Sedley, seems quite to have deserted his place there. I should, under these circumstances, be the only connecting link between age and infancy, which is a position I should not altogether relish."

"I thought," said Teresa, "that you were

much attached to Plover's Cliff, as being near the scenes where your childhood was passed."

"I am indeed attached to every spot of ground there," replied Catherine, with emotion, "but everything is so altered to me, that unless either you or my sister were there with me, the associations with which it teems would be too painful for me to bear.

66

Surely, no creature ever had a keener capacity for suffering than I have, and no one ever had that capacity more tried.

"I was educated far from my parents whom I tenderly loved; and when months and months passed, and I saw them not, neither heard the voice of love, then melancholy first eat into my young heart. I lived to see those same beloved parents reduced from affluence to comparative poverty, (for my fortune has been left me lately) I witnessed the anguish it caused them; the furrowing cheek, the whitening hair, the dimming eye, as friends (base reptiles!) who had fed at their hospitable board, and fawned and

cringed, and smiled their vile, abject smiles, fell away in the frosts of adversity.

"I saw the fair and goodly branches of my house one by one fall and wither away, till I stood alone some by painful and lingering diseases, others by broken heart; and one by shipwreck.

"I have wept over their insensible forms, and seen them, one after the other, carried from my home; and even that home-the home of my childhood-is gone, passed into the hands of cold strangers. I have been scorned and insulted by the rich and fashionable, I have found friendship a breath, and love-out upon the word! love is a fable here below. But I thought it true love --and found it false, empty, cold, calculating!

"I have endeavoured with all my soul to be patient, and to bear unrepiningly my own misfortunes; but, oh! Teresa, it is terrible agony to see the loved ones around us suffer, those whose blood runs also in our veins, and to be unable to comfort them.

"But you can never appreciate the poignancy of my feelings-there is no touch of bitterness in your beautiful nature; I also was naturally warm-hearted, and kindly disposed towards every human being, till the ingratitude and selfishness of the world mingled gall with my blood."

Catherine was in one of her moments of excitement, and, therefore, Teresa forebore to argue with her, but comforted her by sweet, soothing words.

There was a touching tenderness in the tones of Teresa's voice, which never failed to reach the heart.

CHAPTER VI.

"Oh! ye beloved, come home! the hour
Of many a greeting tone,

The time of hearth-light and of song
Returns and ye are gone!

And darkly, heavily it falls
On the forsaken room,

Burdening the heart with tenderness
That deepens 'midst the gloom."

On the night of his rencontre with Teresa at the Opera, Sedley had returned to his hotel with lacerated feelings. Vainly did he strive to conjecture the cause of her manner towards him.

After a long meditation, he came to the conclusion, that whatever might have been her feelings, they were now those of perfect indifference towards him, and that she preferred even a dependent station to marriage with him.