While events thus intimately connected with Lady Glenmore's happiness were silently progressing, Lord Albert D'Esterre's mind was engrossed and torn by a thousand contending feelings of a nature wholly different, but not less fatally destructive of his peace. After recovering from the violence of the first shock which Lady Dunmelraise's sudden departure had occasioned, he had remained torpid and incapable of action: then again, inwardly harassed by the most lively anxiety, he had awaited, with an agony of suspense which none can know save those who have experienced how "hope deferred maketh the heart sick," the communication which he felt Lady Dunmelraise could not possibly long delay, relative to Lady Adeline.
During each of the four and twenty hours which had passed since the blow had fallen on him, Lord Albert had thus been the victim of one contradictory passion or other: but still, in the alternate storm or lull of his emotions, he had mechanically sought the society of the only person in the world whom he now believed entered into his feelings, or took any real interest in his fate. It may be readily supposed that Lady Hamlet Vernon did not lose the advantage which this undivided share of his time afforded her; and she found means, even in the state of apathy in which Lord Albert seemed plunged, and during the lengthened silence to which, at intervals, he gave way even in her presence, to impress him, by a thousand attentions, with a sense of the deep sympathy she felt in all his sufferings. At the same time, she knew the wound that rankled at his heart was yet too recent to be rudely touched, and the paroxysm of his malady too violent to bear those remedies which, with the skilful and tender solicitude of one who watches a patient on the bed of sickness, she awaited a favourable moment to administer, but forced not injudiciously upon his acceptance.
With one exception only, no event occurred, no word was spoken, no circumstance had been alluded to, that could in the remotest degree bring forward the dreaded name of Lady Adeline. When, however, Lord Albert heard, accidentally, at Lady Hamlet Vernon's, that Mr. Foley had also left town a few days after Lady Dunmelraise, his feelings were roused to a pitch that nearly decided him on hastening to Dunmelraise in person. Nor is it probable, notwithstanding Lord Albert's former resolves, that he would longer have hesitated to take this step, had he not been assured, in the most pointed and positive manner, by Lady Hamlet herself (who foresaw and dreaded the effect of this natural impulse), that Mr. Foley had _not_ followed Lady Adeline, but was gone on a visit to some other part of the country.