"
Angela began to understand that it was his fear, or his hatred of Fareham,
which was taking him out of his native country. No word had been said of
her betrothal since that fatal night. It seemed tacitly understood that all
was at an end between her and Denzil Warner. She herself had been prostrate
with a low, nervous fever during a considerable part of that long period of
apprehension and distress in which Denzil lay almost at the point of death,
nursed by his grief-stricken mother, to whom the very name of his so lately
betrothed wife was hateful. Verily the papistical bride had brought a
greater trouble to that house than even Lady Warner's prejudiced mind had
anticipated. Kneeling by her son's bed, exhausted with the passion of long
prayers for his recovery, the mother's thoughts went back to the day when
Angela crossed the threshold of that house for the first time, so fair, so
modest, with a countenance so innocent in its pensive beauty.
"And yet she was guilty at heart even then," Lady Warner told herself, in
the long night-watches, after the trial at Westminster Hall, when Angela's
public confession of an unlawful love had been reported to her by her
favourite Nonconformist Divine, who had been in court throughout the trial,
with Lady Warner's lawyer, watching the proceedings in the interest of Sit
Denzil.
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