"
* * * * *
Let us change the scene to the next day, at the abode of Mr. Faxon.
Dalhousie and his wife, by the kind attentions of their host, were
restored to a comparatively healthy state. The lady had suffered much in
her physical and mental constitution, and a shade of deep melancholy
rested upon her handsome features. She could not forget the horrors of
the dungeon in which she had been confined. It seemed a great epoch in
her life; all before it was strange and undefined, while every trivial
incident since was a great paragraph in her history.
Mr. Faxon was seated in his library, surrounded by his guests. The
affairs of the Dumont family had again been discussed, for to them they
were full of interest.
The good minister feelingly expatiated upon the bitterness of the
heiress' lot, brought up as she had been amid all the refinements of
polished society, whose sensibilities were rendered doubly acute by
nature and the circumstances which environed her, to be thus degraded
into the condition of a base-born, despised being,--to be so suddenly
hurled from honor and opulence,--it was a dreadful blow! So feelingly
did he narrate the particulars, so tenderly did he describe the
loneliness of her position, that his hearers were deeply affected, and
Delia shed a flood of tears.
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