150 ANOTHER OLD ACQUAINTANCE.

of the rent, which might lie in his hands till
called for.

It was evidently the intention of Mr. and Mrs.
Williams to keep up a good understanding with her
family ; the family were satisfied that it should be so,
but, as a means of keeping them abroad, they soon
found a good tenant, for a term of years, for the very
pretty Forest Lodge.

 

CHAPTER V,
ANOTHER OLD ACQUAINTANCE,

We hope our readers are disposed to like Mrs.
Williams ; she was a good woman ; she had some of
those sterling qualities which he had not, but which
always in others had a great influence on him; it is
strange to say it, but it is, nevertheless, true, her first
charm to his feelings was that singular transparency
and evident truthfulness of mind and character which
he had always felt so strongly in Jessie Bannerman.
They both had the power of awakening the better part
of his nature, of producing in him, as it were, an
acquiescence to good. He had deceived his wife, it
is true ; he had fallen into the gulf of falschood, that
fatal gulf which, it seemed to him, ever lay before
him. And oh, what a bitter weight of self-condemn-
ation lay upon his soul for it; how did it come
between him and his happiness, between her love and
his peace of mind. “ Would that I had wist !” is the
most painful expression of a saddened spirit—for it
implies that we have been the fashioners of our own
anguish.

We must now see them in London. All the world
was then talking of Mademoiselle Angela. She was.