“I own it, dear Ida, I own it! I did wrong, very wrong. I felt that as soon as the letter had passed from my hand; I must have been mad when I sent it. I wrote to the London editor the next day to endeavour to stop the publication, but the piece was already in type.”

Such, after a painful conference, was the confession which conscience wrung from the Countess of Dashleigh.

Annabella was reclining on the sofa, her hair disordered, her eyes red with weeping. Ida was kneeling beside her, and the magazine lay on the floor.

“O Anna, Anna! why not own all this to your husband; throw yourself on his mercy, entreat his forgiveness—”

“It would be of no use!” exclaimed Annabella; “that paper he never will forgive. I have already merited his anger; I will not expose myself to his contempt.”

“We may be objects of contempt when we wander from the line of duty, but never when we are struggling back to it again. When we are lost in a thorny labyrinth, what wiser, what nobler course can we pursue, than to retrace every step of the way?”

“I can’t, I can’t,” gasped Annabella; “there is now a deep gulf between me and my husband!”

“Which is widening every moment; which delay may render impassable! It is yet spanned by a slender bridge of hope; but that bridge is trembling,—shaking,—Annabella, if you hold back now, it may sink before your eyes, and for ever!”

“What would you have me to do?” said the countess.

“Write a letter to the earl full of the humblest submission; tell him with what real grief and contrition—”

“Ida, you do not know me!” cried Annabella, pushing the loose hair impatiently back from her temples; “I cannot play the part of a penitent child, begging pardon for having been naughty; I cannot cringe beneath the rod, like a slave trembling before his master!”

“Anna!” exclaimed Ida, fixing on her cousin the earnest gaze of her expressive eyes, “must the slender bridge—your last hope—be broken down beneath the weight of your pride?”

“Pride,” observed the Countess, “has been termed the weakness of noble natures.”

“Pride,—what is it,” exclaimed Ida, “as mirrored in the word of God? Is it not of the world,—that world that passeth away; doth not the Lord resist the proud, while giving grace unto the humble? Doth not inspired truth declare that before destruction the heart of man is haughty, and before honour is humility? Is not the Saviour’s blessing on the meek, and on such as are poor in spirit? Why should I multiply quotations? Your own heart must tell you, dear Anna, that if one thing more than another stands between man and his Maker, and darkens the light of Heaven, it is the baneful spirit of pride!”

“It is interwoven with my nature,” said the countess.

“The life-long battle of the Christian is with his fallen nature, but it is a struggle in which he is not left alone. Nay, a new heart, a new nature is given to those who seek it in earnest prayer; a new heart filled with the Spirit of God, a new nature conformed to the likeness of Him who was meek and lowly in spirit. What are the Bible emblems of those who are the soldiers and saints of the Lord? The lamb, the dove, the little child! Can such be fit types of one who struggles against lawful authority, and recoils from the duty of submission?”

Annabella was a little nettled. “I think,” she observed, with some sarcasm in her tone, “that my saintly cousin is not yet herself so perfect in this virtue of submission, as to entitle her so eloquently to enforce it on another.”

Ida glanced up in surprise. She had not been aware that the quick observation of her cousin had detected in her the lurking enemy of whose presence she herself was scarcely aware, and against whom she was hardly on her guard. But she could not deny the truth of the accusation so suddenly brought against her, and was too earnest in the cause which she was advocating to be silenced by a personal remark.

“Oh! my dear cousin!” she replied, her soft, dark eyes filling with tears, “let not my errors be a stumbling-block in the way of those whom I love. Look not at the miserable transcript, all stained and blotted with human infirmity, but turn your eyes to the blessed Original which is set before us, that we may copy its sacred features into our hearts and our lives! What was the spirit of Christ? and hath not Truth declared that if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ he is none of His? Was it not a spirit patient under suffering, meek under insult, a spirit ever ready to forgive? Did He not love his enemies, bless them that cursed Him, and do good to them that persecuted Him? Look on Him, dearest, look on Him, till in the brightness of His glory sin appear all the darker and more hateful! There is no pride in heaven, Annabella; we must throw away the chain ere we reach that bright place, or we never can enter therein! It is pride that is now shutting you out of your earthly home, barring against you a husband’s heart, changing domestic peace to misery. Oh, how terrible the thought that pride has shut out multitudes from an eternal home, made them aliens from a heavenly Father, rendered them sharers in the fate of that terrible being, who lost a seraph’s crown through his pride! God grant,—God grant that neither you nor I may ever be reckoned amongst them!”

The voice of Ida trembled with emotion, the large tears coursed down her cheeks, and her hands were tight-clasped as if in earnest supplication. It was a sister imploring a sister in danger to seek safety while safety might be found, to tear from her heart the coiling serpent that was lurking there only to destroy! Annabella could not be angry; she was touched by that pleading look; the ice was beginning to thaw, and yet was too strong readily to give way. What was she called upon to do? Not only to forgive, but to entreat for forgiveness, to humble herself in the dust before him to whom her proud spirit had never yet learned to bow! The countess felt that it would be hardly possible so to stoop,—that even for heaven itself she could scarcely sacrifice that which it would be hard to part with, even as a right hand or a right eye! The momentary struggle was fearful! Wringing her hands, Annabella exclaimed, “O Ida, you know not how wretched you make me!”

“And who deserves to be wretched,” said Mrs. Aumerle, who happened at this time to enter the room, “if not she who chooses no guide but her own temper and caprice, who will listen to no advice—not even that of her uncle and her pastor, and who publicly insults the husband whom she is bound in duty to honour? Rise, Ida, rise,” continued the lady, to whose plain sense of right and wrong Annabella’s conduct appeared unpardonable; “I am ashamed to see you on your knees beside a girl who, if she were fifty times a countess, has forfeited claim to our respect.”

Annabella sprang from her sofa, and with eyes wide open and lips apart, stood listening, as her hostess, to Ida’s distress and dismay, finished her rebuke to one whom she regarded as a spoiled, self-willed, obstinate child.

“There is only one excuse for you, Anna, and that is to be found in the indulgence and flattery to which you have been accustomed from the cradle. You have been unfitted to take your proper place either as a wife or the mistress of a household. You have made everything subservient to your humour. But it is time to have done with such childish follies; it is time to renounce the petulant pride which makes your family blush for you! Mr. Aumerle is so indulgent, so unwilling to treat any one harshly, that you are hardly aware, I suspect, how strongly he feels on the subject; but I can assure you that he views your late step in the same light as I do, and he has written to the earl to express to him his strong disapprobation of your conduct.”

“Has he!” exclaimed the countess almost fiercely, “then this house is no longer a place for me! I have stayed here too long already!” and stretching out her hand to the bell-rope, she pulled it violently to summon her maid. “I have been driven out of one home by unkindness, I will not remain in another to be insulted by such language as you have dared to address to me!” Again, with the force of passion, Annabella rang the bell, and it was answered, not only by Bates but by Mabel, who ran in alarmed by the second loud ring, and the sound of a voice raised in anger.

“Bates,” cried the countess, “bring me what I may require for walking, and then pack up my boxes, and follow me as soon as possible to the cottage in which Dr. Bardon resides.”

“But—my lady—”

“At once!” cried the impatient countess.

“O Annabella, dearest Annabella, do not leave us!” exclaimed Mabel, clinging to her cousin, while Ida, almost too much agitated to be intelligible, joined her entreaties to those of her sister.

“Wait—if it were only one day—one hour—only till papa should return!”

But Annabella was inexorable. She had worked herself into that state of passion in which remonstrance seems to have no effect but that of adding fuel to the flame. The storm of anger was less intolerable to her spirit than the state of doubt and self-reproach, which, like a chill, dark mist was falling on her soul, when the words of Mrs. Aumerle roused her from remorse to sudden resentment. The countess determined to seek the dwelling of Bardon, where she felt assured of a welcome, and where she would remain, as she declared, till she had formed arrangements with friends in London. It was, perhaps, unfortunate that Annabella had sufficient resources of her own to render her in pecuniary concerns quite independent of others. She had just arrived at the age which gave her free disposal of these resources, though it had certainly not proved, in her case, to be an age of discretion. It was foreseeing the difficulties and dangers that must beset the wealthy and wilful girl, whose vanity would render her the ready dupe of interested flatterers, that had made the vicar anxious to keep her beside him, until the kindly offices of mutual friends should re-unite her to her husband. This was now impossible. Annabella, closing her ears to remonstrance, and her heart to tenderness, quitted the home of her uncle with an expressed determination never to revisit it again. She would not even suffer her cousins to accompany her, but with sullen resolution set out on her lonely walk.

Ida watched her receding figure with a very heavy heart. “It might have been so different,” she murmured to herself; “her heart was touched, her pride was giving way, when—” and turning towards the spot where her step-mother stood, Ida could not refrain from the exclamation, “it was your coming that changed all!” Without lingering for a reply to the hastily spoken word, Ida sought solitude in the quiet arbour where she had, as we have seen, held converse with her sister upon subjects high and holy. Ida’s only companions now were bitter meditations. She had reproached her father’s wife, but was her own conscience clear even as regarded Annabella? Ida recalled with deep distress her own misgivings on the day on which the countess must have written her fatal paper.

“If I had only spoken to her then,—if I had only pleaded with her then, before the irrevocable step had been taken, oh! it would never have come to this!” and with the anguish of unavailing regret, Ida Aumerle mourned over her sin of omission.